A Dish Best Served Cold

Time will tell if the death of Osama Bin Laden will have any decisive impact on what used to be known as the War on Terror. For now, however, his death should be enjoyed as a greatness unto itself. This is an admittedly morbid stance, and whether we should celebrate the bloody end of the September 11th mastermind in the same manner as the Palestinians who celebrated September 11th, is a fair question. I propose that it is so, for this is in fact the most satisfying revenge for September 11th we could have hoped for.

First some words about a word: by revenge I do not mean going ballistic and inflicting disproportionate violence in retaliation. This kind of thinking has long warped our sensibilities on acceptable treatment of prisoners and where we ought to be going to war. What I speak of is the kind of revenge described in William Ian Miller's Eye for an Eye, a prescription of precision: you take my eye, I take yours, and we're even. Obviously this is not so easily applied when it comes to one person plotting the deaths of thousands, but it gives us something to shoot for: fitting the punishment to the crime. I'm generally skeptical of the death penalty, but in Bin Laden's case incapacitation and probable execution were practically a moral necessity, committed as he was to continuing to carry out terror attacks. The manner in which he died I consider to be the best and most fitting we could ask for.

Let us not forget that less than a year ago, whether Bin Laden was still alive was an open question. It would have been ever so depressing to learn, years after the fact, that the murdering bastard had expired of natural causes or failure of his dialysis machine or something equally mundane. For the U.S. to have unknowingly killed him, along with what would probably have been several innocents, in some bombing run would also have robbed the act of justice and reduced it to something approaching a Four Lions gag.

Capture of course was the ideal. It would have had the same effect as his being killed in action, and the news of it would have been greeted in much the same way. This is part of why I find the rowdy scenes outside the White House and Ground Zero are appropriate. The crowds are not celebrating a person's death so much as a madman's (in this case final) defeat: Osama Bin Laden will never plan another terrorist attack. His capture, in a perfect world, would have been followed by a trial, and then either shipment to a Supermax prison where we'd never hear from him again, or execution, and in the meantime we could extract valuable information on other terror plots, sleeper cells, key figures. In doing all this we could have proved to Bin Laden, to the world, and (most importantly) to ourselves, that our values and our methods of justice work.

But it would have never panned out that way. The abortive attempts to try Khalid Sheik Mohammad in New York, to close Guantanamo, to prosecute the enablers and architects of the Bush Administration torture policy, provide a glimpse of the ugly sideshow that would have followed the capture of Bin Laden. The initial jubilation would have given way to calls for waterboarding, to the embarrassment of a military commission, and perhaps to a bloodthirsty execution not unlike Saddam Hussein's.

What happened instead: a surgical strike in which no U.S. forces were harmed; in which neither sadism nor undue compassion had any time to manifest themselves; in which the great Islamic holy warrior was reduced to using one of his wives as a human shield; and in which we learned the cave he ostensibly dwelled in was in fact a swinging palatial man-cave.

Given the lousy alternatives and the ugly realities of U.S. politics, I fail to see a better revenge for September 11th, than two bullets in Osama Bin Laden's head, his endangered species hair shirt atatter, and his body at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.