The killing of Osama Bin Laden makes me uneasy. I recognize that it gives the administration more room to make decisions in Pakistan. It might increase the options available in places like Libya. It surely provides a boost to the president domestically that he was in need of. It may even force Pakistan to be more cooperative and even weaken Al Qaeda, although neither is inevitable. It certainly gave a lot of people an opportunity to feel good about themselves. All of this isn’t enough, however, to put me at ease.
First of all, it makes me uneasy when people get so excited about the death of another human being that they are driven to tears of joy and moved to song. I’m not saying that it wasn’t the best case scenario to have him killed, because I kind of think it was. It may even have been “justice,” although justice to me is never really as easy as putting a bullet in someone’s head. I would have preferred that Americans react in a more sedate and reflective way. This isn’t a football game. This is war.
Second, I think we are a little too focused on ourselves. There hasn’t been enough said about the impact Al Qaeda has had outside the United States. Hillary Clinton talked about it in her speech, but it has been absent from the popular reaction. In some places I have seen this described as all about finding justice for those who lost loved ones in 9/11. This can’t be all about seeking revenge for the World Trade Centers. It was a tragedy, but just one tragedy. In the scheme of things it was a rather small tragedy, and just a minor piece of the negative impact of Al Qaeda. I think the impact on the perception of Islam is more important, as is the impact of Al Qaeda in the Middle East. I also think we ought to act like what troubles us is the presence of this force for intolerance and violence in the world, and not just the fact that it impacted us.
Third, I get nervous at times like these that we lose sight of the importance of attacking the causes of terrorism rather than just attacking the terrorists. People do things for a reason. They didn’t fly planes into the World Trade Center for the hell of it. It also wasn’t all about virgins in the sky. There were real reasons. We really shouldn’t lose track of that. The democratic movement sweeping the Middle East provides a much more important opportunity to halt terrorism in the future than does Al Qaeda’s death. Terrorism flourishes in places where people do not enjoy democratic freedoms. It also flourishes in places where unemployment (particularly among young men) is high. The improvement of these political and economic realities is of critical importance, and should be our primary goal … along with living up to the ideals we encourage others to adopt (for example, trying terrorists in federal court or eliminating torture as a tool for our military). Just killing terrorists does nothing to eliminate terrorism in the long term.
Fourth, I have trouble not seeing this, at least to a small extent, as politics. It should help Obama in the polls, and the timing couldn’t be better coming on the heels of all this birther nonsense. Everything is politics, but it still makes me uneasy.
The whole thing makes me uneasy … I’m not sad he is dead, but I’m also not going to dance in the street and swear at the sky in a loud voice. This is just cosmetic work. The real job is yet to be done, and is going to take more than an hour.
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