We have, once again, played right into Osama bin Laden's hands. This might seem like an odd assertion, since the al Qaeda mastermind is finally dead at the hands of U.S. Special Forces, most heads of state have voiced their congratulations, and practically the entire U.S. citizenry is unified in celebration.
But Osama bin Laden always understood that the weak use the weapons of the powerful against them, such as U.S. airplanes against U.S. skyscrapers. The weak also lull their opponents into thinking that they have won the war when in fact they have only triumphed in a skirmish.
Martyrdom is the preeminent weapon of the weak, and bin Laden has long courted a martyr's death. He didn't want to end up like Saddam Hussein, who looked like a hunted animal when U.S. soldiers extracted him from his hiding hole. Bin Laden didn't want to go on trial and be executed like a common criminal. He wanted to go out in a blaze of gunfire, the jihadi version of Butch Cassidy.
The U.S. government reports that bin Laden resisted arrest. No doubt it would have been extremely difficult to thwart his desire for martyrdom, bring him back alive, and pump him for information. Still, the value of subjecting bin Laden to the rule of law would have been incalculable. Instead, bin Laden will enter history as a legend, not as a man. His quick burial at sea may well generate a wave of conspiracy theories, a "Deather" movement to parallel the Birthers. Prepare for three more decades of Osama sightings in the Muslim world that rival the once-strong U.S. tabloid obsession with Elvis.
There might also be blowback from the killing. "Al-Qaeda affiliates may speed up operations that were in the pipeline," writes Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker. The Taliban is reportedly preparing a new set of attacks. Fresh from its recent reconciliation with the Palestinian Authority, Hamas condemned the killing of an "Arab holy warrior" but hasn't vowed anything in the way of retaliation.
But the real blowback will be much more subtle than a military tit-for-tat. The weak can't afford direct confrontation. There will be legal, religious, and economic ramifications, and they will again follow bin Laden's script, not out own. On the legal side, bin Laden's strategy has been to corrode the machinery of the nation-state. A fervent believer in a global caliphate, bin Laden viewed sovereignty and the rule of law as obstacles in the path of establishing one world under his version of Islam. His assassination calls into question the adherence of the West to its vaunted principles of justice, much as the support for Hosni Mubarak and other Arab dictators called into question the West's commitment to democracy.
Bin Laden's death sends a particular message about the abuses of state authority -- why is the United States in the business of targeted assassination? -- that may resonate in the Islamic world. Likewise, with former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf condemning the attack as an infringement on his nation's sovereignty, bin Laden in death has been able to drive a further wedge between Washington and Islamabad.
The religious wedge is larger still. Bin Laden, an unabashed partisan of holy war, divided the world into believers and infidels, with the latter category including many Muslims that he considered apostates. In his speech announcing the death of bin Laden, President Barack Obama was careful to "reaffirm that the United States is not -- and never will be -- at war with Islam. I've made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own."
Obama is correct, at least in terms of bin Laden's actions and U.S. intentions. But the perceptions of the last decade's wars are another matter entirely. Washington has waged conflict in predominantly Muslim countries. And these battles have been accompanied by a wave of Islamophobia that have swept through the United States and Europe (not to mention South Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world).
Obama ended his address with what has become a customary presidential sign-off: "May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America." If the wars we pursue aren't crusades strictly speaking, they nevertheless approach the level of holy war when the commander-in-chief invokes God and large sections of the military view their mission as God-given.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bin Laden understood quite well the economic implications of the battle he launched. He had witnessed the Soviet Union's collapse, and he wanted to repeat the trick with the last empire standing. Nine years ago, in Osama bin Laden's Secret Strategy, I wrote that al Qaeda viewed bankruptcy as the path to ruin for the United States. "The United States may look healthy enough at the moment, with the world's largest economy and largest military," I wrote. "But we also shoulder nearly $6 trillion in national debt, which current military spending and tax cuts are only increasing. The war on terrorism, with no end in sight, may very well push us over the economic edge."
Since that 2002 essay, the U.S. national debt has more than doubled. A good chunk of that money went toward the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, alongside the ballooning military budget. Many of the costs -- in terms of lives ruined and opportunities missed -- are only starting to hit us now. We might be already over the edge, like Wile E. Coyote spinning his legs and unaware that the ground has dropped away beneath him. Dead empire walking.
The terrible irony is that, in terms of their influence in the Muslim world, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda have been a dead end for a long time. Most strands of Islamism renounced the caliphate-through-violence strategy long ago. Modern Islamists participate in elections, support nation-states, and embrace modernity. The Arab Spring, as my colleague Phyllis Bennis points out, is only the latest example of nonviolent, political efforts to transform the Middle East and North Africa. Osama bin Laden's greatest magic trick was to persuade the United States and its allies to expend enormous sums of money to fight a small, isolated, and anachronistic force that operated on the very margins of the Muslim world.
Martyrdom, holy war, the lure of power and economic profligacy: with these weapons of the weak, al Qaeda has drawn the United States into a conflict that has sapped our moral, political, and financial resources. We have persuaded ourselves that we're in control, even in this last act of extrajudicial killing. But even here, bin Laden has managed to glorify himself at our expense.
These are the tools of bin Laden. We are the tools of bin Laden.
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The Soviet Union might be gone, but only in name. Russia has risen up with tremendous power, still has tremendous resources, has a significant nuclear arsenal, so what did Bin Laden really achieve with Russia? OBL forced a rebranding of the USSR, and even a former KGB agent runs the country, and Russians are better off now than prior to Afghanistan.
If the US learns its lesson and pursues terrorism as a LE action, we will have better luck. The trick is to not brag about every victory, and maybe even prey on the terrorists asymmentrical tactics by making it look like rival AQ gangs did the killings of competitor AQ gangs, turn Al Qaeda against Al Qaeda, can't be too hard, they strap bombs onto their own children. Al Qaeda terrorists are infected with a lethal dose machoism, have no respect for any human life, so the US could manipulate AQ's arrogant sadistic ways to make them destroy themselves.
To me, killing Bin Laden It was about executing a criminal; and it was about restoring the notion that one does not up and attack America without paying the price. It's a crass lesson to have to teach. Truthfully, it lowers us a bit in the process. But that was part of the cost of the attack. Bin Laden did put us in the position that we had to do something unsavory and a tad extrajudicial.
The other nonsense, however, (like a war of choice against a country unrelated to 9/11) we did to ourselves.
Francis Fukuyama the other day on the Colbert Report that Al Qaida can't get their underpants to explode these days. And this corpse was their leader.
In this game of unparalleled stakes, the losers are the ones who end up with bullets in them. Unless we as codependents, and addicts to the fear of our own creation, assert that he has become a martyr. He never will.
And the taliban prepare a new set of attacks every spring. Nothing new there they just have something else to blame it on.
Wow, is that statement a joke. binLaden wanted a martyrs death so bad that he lived comfortably in a mansion for years under the protection of the Pakitani army. You can be that binLaden never thought for a minute that our military would have swoop into his mansion compound. This guy didn't want martyhood - he wanted and enjoyed the good life while his fools died for him.
Sort of like George Bush, and the fools who died for him and the MIC in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Osama should have been tried in a court of law.
In a perfect world it would have been nice to have a trial. But if in doing so more innocent lives were lost - would you still be so eager to do so? I suggest that if you say yes to this - you are not really taking the thought experiment as seriously as you need to.
In addition. You are free to disobey any law you choose to, and any time. As long as in doing so you are willing to accept the consequences of your actions. This is the very essence of civil disobedience. Protesters break the law frequently. They get arrested and face the consequences. you could say that President Obama did this. But that the courts would never have convicted him of any crime.
Personally, I cannot think of a day that goes by that I do not break laws. Most of us are the same if you really think about how legal you are in your life.
It's also clear to me that we have created the opportunity for Bin Laden's death to be used as a rallying cry (that is, he may have become a useful martyr) that could lead to an intensification of attacks on the West. But, most of us are likely to agree that holding him for trial, as well as trying him, would be a spectacle that would invite massive efforts to free him by means of attacks, hostage situations, etc.
There was no good way out of this, except perhaps to "disappear" him in the dark of the night.
Your point of view has merit, but it fails to take into consideration the importance of the many gains made by the U.S. in undertaking this mission.
That is our focus and that message should be clear to terrorists. We will get you if you commit terrorist acts against us.
Osama won? Really? We're not through with his kind yet.
I wouldn't pay one penny for that. You could pay for the arrest and detention of those psychos all you want, but I applaud the Navy SEALS for the job that they did. And you should be thanking each and every service man and woman for the rest of your life.
It's not just what you do that is important, it's how you do it.