The Obama administration will be remembered in history as the one that brought Osama bin Laden to justice. Its handling of the situation was practically flawless.
Nevertheless, there are two things in which the government erred slightly. With respect to these two matters, the Obama administration’s mistake was to tell the truth. In this cases, it would have been better for the United States if the government had told lies.
As Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times, the nation’s paper of record, in his op-ed this morning, “despite the foreign policy triumph for the United States, it isn’t the end of terrorism.” Already Taliban leaders are vowing to avenge Osama bin Laden and no doubt his death does not change the fundamental situation on the ground in Afghanistan though for Pakistan hard questions must be asked.
How did the world’s most wanted man live in a luxury compound in the hill resort town of Abbottabad just a 62 mile drive (35 miles as the crow flies) from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad? Moreover, the compound built in 2005 was just a stone’s throw from a Pakistani military training base. Most tellingly, the Pakistani government was not informed beforehand of the US special forces’ raid. This inability to trust even the highest echelons of Pakistan’s civilian-military-intelligence establishment is, in my view, the single most disturbing takeaway from this incident. It portends hard choices.
Everyone has a 9/11 story. I won’t bore you with mine. But I’ll just remind you all of the hundreds of non Americans who died at ground zero including 69 Brits, more than have ever been killed in any other terrorist atrocity, more than the 7/7 London tube bombings in 2005
NYC is a capital of the world. It belongs to the world. And our whole lifestyle, liberalism and internationalism were under attack. It was literally an attack on modern western secular values – and we all have a stake in them.
But while I can’t forget those 3,000 victims, the spiral of reaction and counter reaction has amplified those deaths many times over, all the victims of other Al Qaeda atrocities in Bali, Madrid, Baghdad, Lahore, Tanzania. And of course the civilians caught in the cross fire of counter-insurgency and invasion, hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I’m happy this morning, but I don’t feel like partying. I feel like breathing again…
It feels like a ten year nightmare might finally be over…
Last night on his show, Glen Beck had as a guest a person who suggested that:
The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.
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Of course, Beck slapped him down:
Yep. Which is why I was thinking this weekend that if I was him that would be the last thing I would do right now.