News has come out that Osama bin Laden has been killed by U.S. forces during a raid in Pakistan ordered by President Obama. Somewhat to my surprise, I can find no real joy in this. The victory is a Pyrrhic one. He and his organization hit us pretty good in 2001 and did a fair amount of damage; but nothing compared to the damage we did to ourselves by reacting to the attack with two full scale wars and further eroding our commitment to civil liberties.
I, like pretty much any other American alive that day, remember how I felt on 9/11. I was shaken. If you would have told me then that I would have felt anything other than fiercely happy when we killed the bastard responsible, I would have thought you were crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I think the world is better with bin Laden dead than alive, but in my mind, the price was too high for this to be a time of great celebration.
I might reevaluate my opinion if we can use this moment as an excuse to declare victory, close down the prisons at Guantanamo, and bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
And, credit where it is due from everyone from the ground level troops up to President Obama for killing a guy who needed killing.
Roger Bennett says
I concur with your sobriety. I won’t bother trying to figure out the HTML to imbed a link in a combox since I have a short link to a sober assessment from Front Porch Republic of Bin Laden’s post-9/11 “accomplishments.” http://bit.ly/luOMls
Chris says
I understand and can relate Doug, but you know the American people need this victory. Shallow or deceptive as it may be, we need it. It’s been a hard decade and I think deep down we have all been affected by it in some way. To take a moment to reflect and have that weight lifted is healthy psychologically and who knows, maybe even economically!
Erin Rosenberg says
I understand what you are saying, but I really can’t agree. Having just listened to a survivor of the Nairobi Embassy bombing talk about what this means to him, I would suggest, with all due respect, that the “damage” done by Osama Bin Laden through out the world is much greater and more devastating than you are perhaps acknowledging in this calculus. Osama Bin Laden has claimed responsibility for many attacks around the world, well predating 9/11 (USS Cole, for example) and/or endorsed terrorist acts carried out by groups not at his specific direction, but in agreement with his fatwas and Al Qaeda’s aims. I do believe this is a tremendous victory and moment of closure for countless people in the US and the entire world- from New York to Bali to Madrid to Iraq.
In the same way that I may disagree with police policies and procedures, I still believe in accountability for specific crimes. Arresting a murderer may not actually really impact violent crime rates in a community or be an endorsement of any other police action, but it is still valuable in its own because that person is still responsible for his/her own actions and the victims deserve accountability and justice for those specific acts. Osama Bin Laden claimed responsibility for many crimes and murders of tens of thousands of individuals and, regardless of the war on terror and any legitimate questions about US foreign policy, those individuals should not have their own legitimate need for personal accountability for crimes committed against them and their loved ones dismissed for broader policy issues. My opinion of the right for accountability for all victims of Osama Bin Laden’s actions is not affected in any way nor will it change by anything that may occur at Guantanamo Bay or the War in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Doug says
I would respectfully suggest that it should. Even if you believe that the death of bin Laden was worth the cost – and that’s a reasonable position – I think you have to acknowledge the cost.
As a younger man, I read the comic Watchmen. I was impressed by Rorschach’s unyielding principles.
Now I mostly don’t think like that. On this one, if the costs outweighed the benefits, it wasn’t by much. Making this an easier call, however, is that the costs were mostly sunk long ago. Might as well go ahead and get the benefits.
Doghouse Riley says
“We need this?” Are we irrevocably now a nation of grade school students or slumber-party tweens? What we could use, then and now, is some rational thinking to temper the magical, some reason to look at reality instead of hyperreality, some small sense of the limits of rushing in with yer six guns blazin’.
We have spent, so far, at least 1.2 trillion unfunded dollars to revenge ourselves on this guy (the figure is official, and unquestionably low, maybe by half); for comparison sake, the $1.7 trillion in total added expenditures for Obama administration programs, including the dreaded Stimulus, is ushering in the end of the United States as we know them. We might’ve gotten bin-Laden by dealing diplomatically with the Taliban, instead of giving them 24 hours to turn over their sovereignty and get out of Dodge. We’ll never know. What we do know now, and what we did know then, is that we weren’t going to get him by conquering Afghanistan first.
But it sure made people “feel better”.
Erin Rosenberg says
My view of this is very affected by the time I spent at the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia listening to testimony of victims and their families. I have debated the NATO action, who has/has not been prosecuted, what constitutes a war crime and what does not, the effect of the prosecutions on efforts to bring Serbia into the EU community, etc… I have opinions on all these things and recognize the geopolitical implications and strategies at play, negative and positive. But, when you are sitting in court listening to a father cry uncontrollably because of the murder of his son or daughter, watching an elderly man shake as he tries to explain how his neighbor of 20 years was dragged from his home, stripped naked and paraded through the streets before being loaded onto a bus never to be seen again, you quickly realize that there is more that needs to be acknowledged than my removed perspective of the events.
Crimes have dual victims (this is true in domestic enforcement as well)- the actual personal victim and the community at large. Charges are brought on behalf of the state, i.e. the entire community, not the individual victim. But, it is important to recognize where we each fit within that duality. I am an American and, yes, in one sense it was an attack on me, as an American and on my country. But, I was not killed or injured personally on 9/11 and over 3,000 individuals were. So the impact to me is singular, but it is not to all people, and I feel strongly that should be acknowledged by all “singular” impacted victims of Osama Bin Laden’s crimes.
Jack says
Just a word of thanks for the thoughtful comments offerred here –as compared to that which is being aired on many other blogs/outlets.
Buzzcut says
Ugh, quoting “The Watchman” again. If you could write a post that combined The Civil War and The Watchmen… that would be cool. Or not.
OK, in all seriousness, you want to go back to a Sept. 10th mentality. That’s not going to happen, and we shouldn’t allow it to happen. As we saw in the Times Square near bombing, as we saw in the underwear bomber case, we still have enemies.
Doug says
The world is dangerous, always has been. But we need to stop wetting our pants about it.
Paul C. says
It frequently occurs to me that, we currently live in a much safer world than we did during the Cold War (especially after Sunday night’s announcement). While we have to worry about terrorist attacks more now, the threat of nuclear annihilation is now almost nonexistent.
Yet our national defense budget dwarfs what it was a short decade ago. In a time of tremendous national deficit, that should not occur. We need to perform a risk/reward analysis, and scale back our military expenditures in proportion to the reduced threat we face.
Manfred James says
And it only took well over a billion dollars, the deaths tens of thousands, and the devestation of our economy — not to mention a permanent state of war and a changed national mentality that values safety over freedom.
Bring on the next boogyman!
Jason says
Disagree. I think the chances of outlaws terrorizing you have also gone down in the last 200 years.
Buzzcut says
You know, Doug, I don’t disagree with that. We wet our pants about a lot of BS these days. Just off the top of my head, how about not having your kids sit in the front seat? Making them sit in a booster until they’re 30? Having registered sex offenders allowed to vote at schools?
We are a nation of pants wetters.
Paul C. says
Jason: I realize you are probably kidding, but “outlaws” were a state law issue (typically for the thick mustached sheriff). Terrorists are a federal issue.
Buzzcut: if you put your kids in the front seat, the terrorists win. Nevermind the fact that school buses don’t have seat belts and we use gas guzzler SUV’s in large part because you need to fit 3 car seats in a vehicle.
Jason says
Paul C, I was completely serious. The personal chance of any American being terrorized (from crashing planes to organized crime running “protection” to the KKK taking actions to keep people scared) is less today than in years past.
What does it matter if the terrorist is international or domestic, state law or Wyatt Earp?
Paul C. says
Jason: because our country’s founding document, the Constitution, tells us it matters.
Jason says
Seriously? I’m talking about the effect of terrorism on people’s quality of life, and you’re talking about if this is a federal or state issue.
I was responding to your point that we have to worry about terrorist attacks more now. I’m saying, no, we don’t have to worry more about terrorist attacks now. We have to worry about them less than we did 10 years ago, and less than we did 100 years ago.
Any one person’s chance of being directly affected by a terrorist attack is lower than MANY other things that we really don’t give a crap about, like dying from heart disease.
Paul C. says
Oh, my bad Jason. I didn’t realize you were actually trying to make such an irrelevant point. First of all, your comment is really just taking the comment I made (that we spend too much on national defense), and taking it one step further. So for the most part, we agree.
Still, it doesn’t make any sense to compare our current “safety” levels with the safety levels of 200 years ago. People don’t care how safe their great, great, great, great,great, great grandparents were (assuming 25 years per generation), and don’t use that as a reference point. What people do care about is “are you safer than you were 8 years (two presidential terms) ago”. 8 years has meaning, 200 years does not.
Jason says
It is quite a relevant point. From security theater at the airport to ICE busting doors down because of an unsecured WiFi access point, we’ve become so scared that we are paying a lot of money to give freedom away.
Our chances of terrorism are less than winning the lottery for the last 9 years, and for the previous 40ish years before 9/11.
I’ve not done the math, but I’ll go ahead and assume that that lotto is ahead when normalized over someone’s life.
Paul C. says
Again, I agree. I don’t believe we are doing an adequate cost-benefit analysis when it comes to some of these procedures. Of course, nobody wants to hear about a cost-benefit analysis when an 8 y/o child gets killed from a preventable attack.