Upon learning of the news of the killing of Osama Bin Laden (I learned via text – I was at a concert of my brother's), and then, listening to President Obama's recap of the events in his radio address as we drove home, I was struck by quite a few thoughts and emotions, a process of visceral relief followed by rationality of a cold, detached, and wise disposition that quickly erased any positivity of the evening's breaking news.
The result of exhaustive planning and intelligence gathering, the Bin Laden killing can be applauded for, if anything, the tactic and bravery of the military's actions. As a typically excellent NPR report described it, the soldiers involved in the raid knew every square inch of the Bin Laden mansion, so extensive was their research and briefing of the premises. And the fact that not a single US soldier was, as we're told at least, killed in the raid? Impressive, courageous, and hella ballsy, and I say that as someone who is fervently anti-war.
And I admit, I felt a definite sense of relief when I learned of Bin Laden's fate. I live quite close to the third largest city in the United States, and quite a few family and friends are scattered amongst its vast sprawl. Although I despise the way we are relentlessly slaughtered with information on the probabilities of terrorist attacks (indeed, Barry Glassner has been covering this process for years, where the public is constantly terrorized – and that is the accurate verb – and motivated to do nothing but consume), the chance of another terror attack on US soil remains inevitable, and while I never considered that reality on a day-to-day basis, it was always a reality I had to accept.
But even with that admission, there are some deeply unsettling details about the Bin Laden slaying that I have been unable to shake, even if, as Glenn Greenwald forcefully points out, it is the "un-American" thing to do.
One, we need to admit the obvious: Osama Bin Laden was a wealthy, intelligent man, one who deeply understood the consequences of his radicalism and took every precaution in preparing for his inevitable death. As Dina Temple-Raston explored on today's "All Things Considered" (seriously, check out NPR's entire coverage of the event; it's quite detailed and informative), Bin Laden had begun choosing his successors more than 10 years ago, and now that he's dead, there are a number of al-Qaida operatives who are expected to take his place, marque among them Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian who is currently plugged as the no. 2 man of the operation. Basically, the current al-Qaida apparatus is simply too well-funded and too spread out for Bin Laden's death to have any impact on their operations, and the terrorist plots currently being planned in Yemen have undeniably continued today, even with the events of May 1. Now if only we had killed Bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in 2003...that would be a different narrative altogether.
Two, what the death of Osama Bin Laden cannot do is erase the substantial evils the United States unleashed following the bombings of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Here is a criminally brief synopses of some of those evils:
- Two unnecessary wars (one of which was blatantly illegal by international law – and fixed via false intelligence), which have contributed to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of human beings. Since 2006, nearly 10,000 Afghans have been killed. 4700 American troops have died in combat, between the two wars. And, worst of all, as many as 1.5 million Iraqis have died, with another 4-5 million being displaced. Look at this astounding map assembled by the Guardian, based on a customarily revelatory dump of documents from Wikileaks, and try to reconcile those numbers with the war currently taking place. And I haven't even mentioned the cost.
- An unparalleled abuse of civil liberties in the 21st century, beginning with the complete demolition of the Bill of Rights, followed by breathtakingly broad invasions of privacy via illegal wiretapping and electronic surveillance of millions of American citizens, the suspension of habeas corpus, the abduction, rendition, and torture of hundreds of innocent people (some of whom DIED during interrogation), the jailing and continued torture of hundreds more without the right to an attorney, and, probably my favorite of them all, the insistence by the US Justice Department that all actions taken were beyond the rule of law.
- And again, that is a Mickey Mouse summarization of all that has happened – and I fear, with considerable degree, that the death of Bin Laden will now be used to justify all that has happened and the countless crimes that were committed. After all, we got our man, right?
And three, perhaps most haunting of all, is the profoundly uncomfortable realization that Bin Laden accomplished everything he set out to do with the attacks of 9/11, and that his death could not be of any less significance for him and his followers. Here is Bin Laden, in one of his more famous quotes,
"America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and a wide-ranging economy, but all this is built on an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its obvious weak spots. If America is hit in one hundredth of these weak spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership."
The brilliance of Bin Laden's plan – and yes, we can call it that, as it was a plan of immense foresight – was exploiting the very arrogance and bravado of the American system. He knew he could never poison the essence of American politics, as he so desired, by attacking America head on. As the US proved in World War II, no country on Earth is remotely capable of the resources and sheer numbers of the United States war economy, least of all a Muslim radical with a scant number of devoted followers.
So instead, Bin Laden went for the spectacle, harming the US in the most public and bombastic manner possible, shaming and frightening an entire nation in the process. And we behaved exactly as he expected us to, flashing our misguided power, committing vast resources to fruitless campaigns and heartless excursions of sheer military chest-thumping, and, in the process, crippling the very infrastructure on which our country sat, all while Bin Laden relaxed in Pakistan. In the end, he won, and that is the most haunting detail of the entire Bin Laden saga.
To be clear, we cannot lay credit for all of America's problems on Bin Laden's 9/11 attacks. The financial crisis would have happened with or without 9/11. Alan Greenspan dramatically slashed interest rates following the collapse of the NASDAQ, and Bill Clinton signed critical deregulatory legislation in 1999 and 2000, thereby setting the table for the reckless borrowing, lending, and leveraging that would bring the world economic foundation to its knees.
But aside from that, Bin Laden and al-Qaida directly inspired a series of events that plunged the United States into an abyss, one rife with darkness, evil, and neglect. As Norman Mailer so perfectly phrased it, in an extraordinary interview with the vacuous Charlie Rose, we embarked on a crusade of intolerance that changed the face of American Democracy for the worst – and we will never recover from it.
When I drove to work earlier today, I listened to Eric Dolphy's 1964 masterpiece "Out to Lunch!" Never before have the disjointed rhythms and howling syncopations of Dolphy sounded more at home, cruising down the freeway in the fractured and desolate land of the free, home of the brave:
(Flickr photo courtesy of norbert_blech)
