Reflections on the Killing of Osama bin Laden

As I thought about the killing of Osama bin Laden I wondered what has happened to this society in the last 60 years. At the end of World War II we sought to reestablish the rule of law on a war-shattered planet. We brought to justice the malefactors in a war that had killed millions, wounded many more, and massively displaced populations. As heinous as the crimes were we did not summarily kill these practitioners of terror. With bin Laden we made no attempt to capture him and bring him to a trial in which the world could hear the evidence and judge the verdict. Instead we summarily killed him, even though others in the building were handcuffed. He was unarmed. We dumped his body into the ocean, an act that Muslim clerics condemn as against their religion and which, they fear, will incite further violence against the United States. In short, we had become our enemy. This was an act of barbarity that the America of 1946 did not tolerate, although we did tolerate incinerating thousands of innocents with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When World War II was over President Roosevelt sought to eliminate colonialism by establishing the United Nations in which all nations would have a voice. He tried to create a mechanism for peace. This time, Bush, one of the worst presidents we have ever had and his imperialist buddies sought to dominate the rest of the world. How could we be so retrograde?

One answer is that we are now dealing with terrorism, not states with defined borders and their armies. While this is true it is, in my view, insufficient as an explanation. We knew we were dealing with terrorism from the beginning, yet we said we were going to war with them. The fact that terrorism made all the difference between our behavior at the end of World War II and our behavior in killing bin Laden should have called forth a different approach. The fact that it did not betrays the worst sort of societal manipulation to lead us into the bloody morass we have created. The fact that 80 well trained men carried out the mission makes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan starkly irrelevant in necessity and tragically calamitous in their results. Prior to the attacks on the Taliban and the uncalled for invasion of Iraq many people drew attention to the fact that the responsible reaction to the 9-11 attack was a global police action, which would have resulted in an operation much like the one that located him and could easily have captured him had not the Bush and now Obama administrations had other goals in mind. The Obama administration has said that they did not want a trial during which bin Laden could stir up additional enmity. The same could have been said of the Nazi criminals, but we deemed preserving the rule of law was more important than not stimulating continuing Nazi propaganda. Nazism did not die and still has many adherents in Germany,France and the United States. Similarly the summary killing of bin Laden will not staunch the animosity of many of those of his persuasion toward this country. Keeping Chalmers Johnson's articulation of blowback in mind, we have done nothing to reduce terrorism, much less understand it and seek a way to defuse it. For those of good will, stopping this misuse of terrorism to justify our own terrorism, e.g. drone attacks, must be an ongoing and accelerated process.

Bob Newhard