Fictitious Times

In thinking about the Osama bin Laden hit my mind keeps coming back to fiction. There was much of it to go around during those heady hours following the initial announcement: fictitious firefights, fictitious human shields, even fictitious Martin Luther King and Mark Twain quotes that spread among social networks and blogs in response to the news of bin Laden's death. Twain's adage about a lie getting halfway around the world before the truth has put its shoes on would be fitting, were it not similarly undocumented.

These words and ideas spread and were spread, of course, because they sounded so good and so right. It brought to mind a decidedly different fiction, an old episode of The Simpsons, "Lisa the Iconoclast." Lisa learns that Jebediah Springfield, the venerated founder of Lisa's hometown, was really a murderous pirate. She ends up keeping the bombshell secret to herself, concluding that Springfield's myth brought out the best in people, which was sufficient for keeping it alive.

This sounds nice--so good and so right--but as the cases of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman have shown us, looking away from inconvenient truths involves actively duping people, including grieving families, and often in service of less than noble causes (namely, ass-covering). We re-learned this lesson just a few weeks ago, when it was revealed Greg "Three Cups of Tea" Mortenson's Pakistani school-building philanthropy was really a poorly-implemented cover for his own enrichment. If we care not just about feeling good about ourselves but about the state of things in the real world, then knowing the truth and grappling with its implications is imperative.

Osama bin Laden is dead and no longer a threat. That much we can celebrate. But what if he didn't go down in a firefight? What if he was in fact captured, in our protective custody, and then executed in front of his daughter? What kind of legal precedent does this set?

There is another, fact-based, fiction I've pondered regarding this matter, Steven Spielberg's Munich. Its broader concern with the War on Terror was evident when it came out in 2005, and to my mind the questions it asks are even more pertinent now that bin Laden is gone. Now that we've taken out the 9/11 mastermind, where do we go? How far down the chain of command are we going to be knocking off Al Qaeda leadership, including an American citizen?



I argued before that revenge and justice are one in the same, and that avenging 9/11 was justified and defensible. I still believe that. However, an eye for an eye system of justice only works when both sides are willing to, eventually, call it even. As the endless grind of the Israel-Palestine issue shows, however, reprisal can all to easily take on a life of its own. And so I fixate on Munich's closing, warning, words:

There's no peace at the end of this, no matter what you believe.

The real Munich avenger never said that, never had such doubts. But it sounds so good to imagine he did.

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.

For the Record

There are a lot of things wrong with U.S. policy regarding Islamic terrorism, but the death of Osama bin Laden is not one of them. That is all.

Really Reaching Now

There once was a time when a new bin Laden tape could strike fear into our hearts, but that was mostly immediately following September 11th. In 2004 bin Laden released a tape just days before the presidential election to which some attribute Bush's victory. At that point he might have had some measure of influence

Yet the last time we actually saw bin Laden on tape, as opposed to listening to voiceovers, recall, was in September 2007. More notable than any of the usual "Death to America" tripe, of which there was comparatively little, were mentions of the news of the day like "the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes." He sounded like he was making a run for elected office.

Now the news making the rounds is that bin Laden's number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri has resorted to calling Barack Obama a "house negro," a remark which on a political circle rests somewhere to the left of Ted Rall's use of the less polite version of that term on Condoleezza Rice, and to the right of Rush Limbaugh's "Barack the Magic Negro" song.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, no doubt. But perhaps we can claim it as a strange, minor victory that the terrorists, whose very occupation involves sewing fear, are sounding less like an existential threat to western civilization and more like the outer fringes of our punditocracy.