"Deceased," my friends! The bad guy has finally lost, blown directly into Hell's fireiest circle by the brave boys of Seal Team VI. The fixed his little red wagon for fucking good. And you know what? I hope it hurt. If there actually is a God, he'll have felt the pressure of his brain exploding against the back of his eyeballs before his skull blew apart.
Bin Laden may or may not have met his great reward hiding behind a girl, which should really surprise no one. Terrorists are rather famous for their ignominious ends. Abu Nidal was found dead in Baghdad seven months before the U.S invasion. Iraqi officials reported that he had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head ... multiple times. The regime of Saddam Hussein had a deeply ironic sense of humor that was never really appreciated by us in the West.
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, formerly known as Carlos the Jackal, was captured as he was recovering in a Sudanese villa from surgery that fixed a varicose vein in his nuts. It happens to the best of us, but few os us deserve it like he did.
It's humiliating, to be sure, but nobody signs up for the game without knowing that the dice ain't gonna roll their way forever. At some point, most terrorists are going to be taken out in the most unflattering ways. The job description almost demands it.
Osama was different from those that came before him in that he succeeded where Nidal and Carlos failed. Only geeks like me know who the latter two even are these days, but bin Laden is going to live forever. That son of a bitch changed history. He succeeded beyond what must have been his wildest dreams and, in the end, he might very well have won.
Bin Laden always overplayed his role in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. He was an engineer and a money man. He built roads and hidey-holes. He moved construction equipment in and out of the country and provided medical services. The only time that he was known to have engaged the Russians, he nearly got his ass shot off.
But what he saw there informed the rest of his life and his three-quarters wrong, misunderstood view of history; combined with his being charismatic and a gifted manager, changed the way the rest of us live. He changed the way we're going to live for a good long time, and his newly ventilated cranium really does nothing to change that.
He and his twisted brethren saw the imperial Russian bear storm into a Muslim neighborhood and how his coreligionists from across the globe answered the call to jihad. It took nearly a decade and untold carnage, but that bear was beaten back. Three years afterward, it vanished from the face of the earth entirely. How could they not conclude that this was Allah's divine vengeance? It doesn't matter that the mujaheddin were almost uniformly illiterate goat-herders with a profound nostalgia for the 7th century. That's what they believed. And they weren't wrong, at least not completely.
After the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, bin Laden's new group, al Qaeda, turned its lonely eyes to the other great atheist superpower, the United States.
Being as they were, seventh century nostalgists, al Qaeda never really understood that the guns, money and Stinger missiles that they used to bring the Russians so low were provided by the Americans, Saudis and Chinese. They thought that they came from the Pakistanis, which in a roundabout way, they did. The ISI controlled the operation and they alone determined who would enjoy the weapons and the power they brought them. It should surprise no one that the mujaheddin forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar went into battle against the Soviets yelling "Death to America."
After the Soviet takedown, it was only logical that the jihadis would take a poke at the other great power that supported, financed and trained the apostate regimes that repressed and tortured believers. It wasn't just a failure of imagination that no one saw it coming, it was a failure of common sense.
The U.S government, being the U.S government, misrepresented the new threat almost from the minute it took shape in the street of Lower Manhattan in February of 1993. "They hate us for our freedom," we heard from Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. And virtually no one is willing to point out that they were lying. These people weren't willing to die because they were overly aroused by the way Britney Spears looked in her early videos. Slutty Catholic schoolgirl outfits are famous for a few things, but war isn't one of them.
The jihadis are pissed at American foreign policy. Period. But if a president actually had the balls to go on TV and say that, most Americans - who are genuinely peace-loving to point of having an almost studied ignorance of the rest of the world - would say "Well, why don't we change our foreign policy?" And that can be problematic for a people who like buying their oil at fifty cents a barrel.
If the Bush administration knew anything, they knew that anything worth doing was worth overdoing. Even after 9/11, they never relented in telling us that we were making war to ensure that girls were going to school eight times zones away, which had never before happened in all of human history. The inhuman incineration of nearly 3,000 innocents in New York City was just no longer enough. The war in Afghanistan wasn't long about retribution. It became, by the military' s own branding, a "just crusade."
The historical problem with a crusade is that they tend not to go well unless they're won quickly. If they aren't, they tend to become problematic. Assuming that you're going to forcibly change anyone's religious virtues is about as silly as thinking that they'll change yours.
And that's really what the "War on Terror" comes down to. "Terror", in and of itself, isn't an enemy. It's a tactic. The United States didn't win the War of Independence by fighting against outflanking maneuvers any more than they'll win a War in Terror. If you think about it really hard, you might just understand that you're an idiot for even having thought very hard about it in the first fucking place.
Al Qaeda is the enemy today, every bit as much as the Nazis were in World War Two. Well, when you kill bin Laden, you defeat the enemy. Unless you don't. Then you're fucked, just as you would be if you thought that killing Boy George would have prevented the 1980s.Then you're you're in a position where you think that you're a hero, until Kajagoogoo rises in to destroy us all and there's no one to defend us because you're off collecting your trophy.
Yeah, we got bin Laden. But when you really think about it, that's like thinking that murdering Donald Trump is going to cancel The Apprentice. No one ever counts on NBC's bringing Warren Buffett out of the darkness, do they?
Doing a Fredo on Osama is important, have no doubt about it. But in the grand scheme of things, he's only Fredo. It doesn't matter how many times that you dump him off of the rowboat if his ideas survive.
I was going to go into great depth about the international ramifications of this story, but I've already gone on for a long time, and more importantly, I'm bored. Maybe I'll come back to it tomorrow. I'm still exhausted by the goddamn Canadian election.
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