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Ambivalent
May. 2nd, 2011 09:25 amI'm feeling a bit ambivalent about the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
He was a vile human being; I have no problem with justifying his death.
That said, I feel no happiness in it either. Killing this one person won't end the wars, won't bring back the several thousand people he had killed, won't rebuild the towers and won't restore our treasuries. Killing bin Laden was like euthanizing a rabid wolf: it's a thing one must do for the sake of the greater community.
I'm also concerned. Making a martyr of him may bring a whole new level of escalation in terrorism, at least in the short term. Perhaps the heart has been torn out of al Qaeda, or perhaps we've spent all this time & energy tracking down one person when another person(s) is standing by to take his place and rebuilt the organization. If so, we're no further ahead.
And I'm saddened by our own failures in the West. In so many ways, bin Laden already won: he demonstrated we were more vulnerable than we thought, he made us gut our own constitutions and abandon our own rights & freedoms, he got us to bankrupt our governments and he turned us on ourselves, fearing our own shadows, accusing our next door neighbors of sedition for not being white anglo christians and wasting our time & resources on wild goose chases. I'm sure we can't --or won't-- change back to what we were now that he's dead.
And now what? Now that bin Laden is dead, what will this do to the military operations in Afghanistan? How will this affect our relations with the middle east? Will this have a lasting impact on our relations with the muslim world?
He was a vile human being; I have no problem with justifying his death.
That said, I feel no happiness in it either. Killing this one person won't end the wars, won't bring back the several thousand people he had killed, won't rebuild the towers and won't restore our treasuries. Killing bin Laden was like euthanizing a rabid wolf: it's a thing one must do for the sake of the greater community.
I'm also concerned. Making a martyr of him may bring a whole new level of escalation in terrorism, at least in the short term. Perhaps the heart has been torn out of al Qaeda, or perhaps we've spent all this time & energy tracking down one person when another person(s) is standing by to take his place and rebuilt the organization. If so, we're no further ahead.
And I'm saddened by our own failures in the West. In so many ways, bin Laden already won: he demonstrated we were more vulnerable than we thought, he made us gut our own constitutions and abandon our own rights & freedoms, he got us to bankrupt our governments and he turned us on ourselves, fearing our own shadows, accusing our next door neighbors of sedition for not being white anglo christians and wasting our time & resources on wild goose chases. I'm sure we can't --or won't-- change back to what we were now that he's dead.
And now what? Now that bin Laden is dead, what will this do to the military operations in Afghanistan? How will this affect our relations with the middle east? Will this have a lasting impact on our relations with the muslim world?
