Now that bin-Laden is dead, the landscape has certainly changed. It changes politically, strategically, and economically. It's a different world now.
The death of bin-Laden will be a snapshot of a time in history at home and abroad. Overseas we can gage the political temperature by reactions to it in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere abroad. At home, bin-Laden's death gives greater attention to the political divide in this country with the twin issues of how much credit do George W. Bush and waterboarding get for his killing. There are even those who believe that bin-Laden should have been brought to trial, not killed. It also exposes a greater sense of confidence on the side of Progressives for their prospects in 2012, and a greater insecurity on the Right for their chances.
Those first few days after 9/11 were filled with fear. People didn't know how to act, and were afraid of their shadows, as well as everyone else's. Alan Grayson gave this anecdote about life after even a year after 9/11:
About a year after 9/11, I was sitting in an airport terminal, waiting for a flight, when nature called. I turned to the young lady sitting next to me, and asked her if she would watch my carry-on baggage while I went to the restroom.
She looked at me, she hesitated, and then she asked, 'How do I know that you’re not a terrorist?'
She wasn’t kidding. She looked a little scared.
I thought about delivering some snappy retort, like 'I used to be a suicide bomber, but I quit, because I didn’t like the pension benefits.' I could see, though, that she was actually feeling some fear, so I looked her in the eye and said, 'I’m not a terrorist' She thought for a moment, and then she said, 'OK, I’ll watch your bags.'
I myself remember the anger, the kind of fear which that woman felt, and the nervous speculation fueled by the anthrax scare, and I even recognized the inevitability of war with Iraq. I was too angry to care. Iraq, Al Qaeda, were they all that different? It was the kind of anger that Bush and the neocons knew they could count on. Irrational anger leading to war.
While I regret the initial ambivalence towards Bush's wars this anger caused in me,the sting of 9/11 is why I joined in celebrating the death of this monstrous being who could cause such mass murder on an inhuman scale, and feel justified in it. As I looked into my flatscreen, and watched those crowds at Lafayette Park, it occurred to me that you couldn't tell Republicans from Democrats in that crowd of rejoicers.
I also heard plenty of praise for President Obama.
The New York Times said:
The increase in Mr. Obama’s ratings came largely from Republicans and independents. Among independents, his approval rating increased 11 points from last month, to 52 percent, while among Republicans it rose 15 points, to 24 percent. Among Democrats, 86 percent supported his job performance, compared with 79 percent in April.
But that same article proceeded to say:
But in an indication that anxieties about unemployment, gas prices and the national debt have not withered with Bin Laden’s death, good will toward Mr. Obama did not extend to his economic policies. More than half said they disapproved of his handling of the economy, similar to the result last month, the poll found.
Which is why the President should take full advantage of his present situation spend some capital on the weaknesses of the Republicans.
However, the Progressives can claim even more specific, and therefore more poignant credit for President Obama.
For one thing, they'll need to take President Obama more seriously as a Strong on Security President. And don't they know it! Already the Republicans are attempting to revise and whitewash history to their advantage. It was water boarding that saved the day! Or, it was George W. Bush's unflinching leadership that led to this glorious moment, while Obama takes the credit!
Be careful what you wish for, because the story will be as fluid as the Niagara Falls for the next few months! It may not be as pat as you want it to be!
One thing is certain. The chronology doesn't lie - and it does not put W in a good light!
With all this crowing about how waterboarding saved the day in the hunt for bin Laden, the Bush Crowd would do well to remember that Bush himself threw in the towel as far as bin Laden was concerned. Like a little boy far too image conscious to admit that he lost bin Laden at Tora Bora, he shrugged it off with a desire to move onto something else. All with the maturity of a Peewee Herman falling off his bike and saying that he meant to do it.
So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong; that when we find enemy bunched up like we did in Shahikot Mountains, that the military has all the support it needs to go in and do the job, which they did.
Certainly Bush sought to give the impression that Afghanistan was of prime importance, But, all-in-all he just wanted to take all his marbles and go to Iraq. Afghanistan became the forgotten war. And the wound that we forgot to close began to fester.
The lack of clarity in strategic conception led directly to the imbroglio in Afghanistan and Pakistan today. There is no longer any question that the diversion of U.S. troops and, in particular, intelligence assets and special forces to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 produced a Taliban and Qaida resurgence in South Asia. It also made the Pakistanis—who even in the best of times were playing a double game—hedge about their own strategic shift away from support for jihadis as a counterweight to India. In 2007, Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States at the time, suggested that this was when Washington began to lose some of his country’s support. After 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi in March 2003—just as Bush was invading Iraq—'al-Qaida was almost destroyed in an operational sense,' Durrani told me. 'But then al-Qaida got a vacuum in Afghanistan. And they got a motivational area in Iraq. Al-Qaida rejuvenated.'
So please don't tell me that The Second Transient Tourist from Kennebunkport (who in Texas this month is being honored along with The First,) had anything substantial to do with bringing bin Laden to justice.
But that did not stop Brent Bozell from touting the virtues of waterboarding. Indeed, Bozell and the Right seem to be hell bent for leather intent upon using bin Laden's death to prove their point.
'[I]t is because of waterboarding Osama bin Laden is dead, and everybody knows it,' the MRC founder argued. 'It's about time people started admitting it in [Washington] that it is because of these techniques that George Bush was crucified over that Osama bin Laden is dead today,' he added.
As for the mainstream media, 'it's high time they started apologizing to [President Bush]' for accusing him of authorizing torture and arguing that waterboarding would never lead to actionable intelligence.
Except that, if waterboarding works, then why didn't they already apprehend bin Laden years before? Couldn't the "accurate information" coming forth from a detainee's water-logged mouth have produced Osama's location instead of us assuming that he lived in the tribal regions of Pakistan?
Finally, the Right must learn to accept that the era of the Haight-Ashbury Birkenstock liberal is over.
Everywhere I go on the Web, I keep hearing about these flower-bedecked granny glasses wearing people that I don't remember hearing about since the late '70's. One guy even gave a triumphant guffaw at what he thought was liberal hypocrisy in the face of bin Laden's death:
The most disgusting part of this reality is that liberals only believe in justice at the end of a bullet when they feel violated. So their friend whose daughter was kidnapped and raped and tortured should turn the other cheek and not be relieved and delighted when the killer is brought to justice, but when they lose their own loved one or their body, family, city feels threatened, the liberal suddenly becomes Chuck Norris–or more likely, is grateful that Chuck is willing to kick bad-guy ass.
If they really believed their pap, they’d be crying tears for Osama Bin Laden. They’d be pining away for the injustice. They’d weep for the rule of international law and Geneva conventions that were violated. They would be wearing their pink shirts in front of the White House and yanking out their boobies in outraged protest at the gross violation of a sovereign nation’s borders.
No, not very likely my friend.
In my opinion, the political correctness of the '80's turned a lot of liberals away from the Left, indeed, it helped to damage the reputation of liberalism to the point where the term "moderate" arose as a name for what true liberals are - reasonable people who want to stand for real American values, who want everyone to live by the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The rights of the least of us, are the same as the rights of the rest of us. I want a good living. I will give you a good living. I want freedom. I will give you freedom. I want peace and security. I will give you peace and security. And in return, you will give these things back to me.
On the other hand, if you threaten to take these things away from me, then I reserve the right to fight back in the appropriate manner. Most of the time, I will not need to resort to violence. I live in a democracy where I have many peaceful means to resort to. But if you threaten my life, my security, and that of those around me, and you resort to violence, don't expect me not to respond in kind. I will mix it up. Swing a gun into my face and I will block it. A kick to the groin, a chop to the neck, I will do what I have to, to subdue you. And yes, if you leave me no choice, I will kill you. Coombayayahs are not in the picture for you!
And lastly I would like to speak to the pedants who cling to their floating icebergs of dogma, and are blind to the lifeboats of humanity around them.
We put those who do evil things on trial not so much for them (though we do do it for them because, unlike their view of us, we see them as human), but we do it for ourselves. We do it because we are civilized, we are a free people, we believe that everyone has a right to their day in court, even the worst persons. We believe in the rule of law even if they don't. That makes us strong, stronger than them, and we will defeat their evil through our open and just society. If we behave like them, we will eventually become them. I do not believe in an eye for an eye. I think Jesus Christ said something about how he was here on earth to change that, to tell us to love our enemies. That's a tough thing to live by. The Nazis started a world war in which some 40+ million died. Yet we gave them their day in court, just to show them that WE ARE NOT LIKE YOU. And to show the world the evil deeds they did. Unfortunately, to put bin Laden on trial would have been problematic because he used to "work" for us in the 1980s when we trained, armed and funded his rebels in Afghanistan. Too much might come out about this Frankenstein we created -- and who would then come back 20 years later to murder 3,000 of our citizens.
Give it up! Loving your enemies does not mean that you turn into a doormat for them. And that "Frankenstein" we created was in response to the Soviet invasion of that country, where Afghans were already fighting for their freedom. For you to stand there and lament that bin Laden was not given due process before he died, you'd have to hallucinate some sort of artificial social construct where the rules of the road, and those of humanity don't apply. Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky seem to think that finding bin Laden in a virtual war zone like Pakistan was no different than arresting him in Dubuque Iowa, or Onondaga Hill, New York. The relative peace of Abbottabad aside, the very nature of the conflict, the theater of operation, and of how bin Laden lived, precluded that.
Now Mr. Chomsky seems to think that he's turning the argument for killing bin Laden on it's ear with this supposition:
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
On the day of 9/11, commando actions were launched on four unsuspecting airplanes by foreign agents. Three thousand innocent people were in fact assassinated. And they were either incinerated, crushed or both when the towers went down, the Pentagon attacked, and the plane went down near Shanksville, PA.
As for Bush's crimes "vastly exceeding" bin Laden's, that remains to be seen, but they certainly don't exceed bin Laden's in scope. It was an unprovoked act of mass murder that Osama committed on September 11. Bin Laden, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were judge, jury and hangman.
I would cite to Chomsky and Moore something that Eugene Robinson just said today:
He held hostage our foreign policy — directly or indirectly provoking two wars — and, with it, hijacked a huge chunk of the federal treasury. He goaded our leaders into stretching our military almost to the breaking point. He was the inspiration, or the excuse, for a vast expansion of the government’s power to intrude into our private lives. He changed us so that whenever we see an unattended gym bag, we don’t think 'absent-mindedness,' we think 'potential bomb.
The threat of terrorism is still with us, but the man who embodied that threat is gone. We can think more clearly now — about our mission in Afghanistan and our relationship with Pakistan, about the trade-offs between liberty and security, about which of our fears are rational and which are not."
I would remind Mr. Robinson though, that even though we no longer have to fear him, people will still fear the possibility of him, and therefore we may take comfort in the fact that where we find terrorists, we do strike quickly, without warning. By their very definition, terrorists do not respect law or social convention. They only respect force and the terror it produces. We must respond in kind.
No matter how macabre this may sound - "Ding, dong, the witch is dead!"
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