Well, if I’m not going to resume active blogging now, when will I ever get around to it?
It’s only fitting and proper to start by congratulating President Obama, something that there’s rarely much reason to do. This time, when it mattered a lot, he didn’t vote “present”. Greenlighting a risky raid into Pakistan was a decision on a level with George W. Bush’s going after the Taliban regime with seemingly nugatory forces and throwing more resources into Iraq when the situation looked bleakest. In all of these cases, there was no guarantee of success, and failure would have been catastrophic. Can you imagine what today’s headlines would look like if two dozen SEAL’s had been killed or captured by al-Qa’eda?
For once, the President didn’t “lead from behind”. I suspect that the execution of Osama bin-Laden will be his brief, shining moment of glory, but I hope that I’m proven wrong.
He did try to spoil the occasion with a characteristically ungracious and self-centered speech. But that’s just Obama being Obama. It would be forgivable in general if the economy were growing briskly, workers were returning to the job market and finding jobs there, Iran and North Korea were abandoning their nuclear weapons programs, the Arab Spring were being guided toward democracy rather than left to drift into Islamofascism, and so on. It is forgivable in particular when the President announces a genuine achievement, one that many of us had given up hoping for.
Judging from my casual blog browsing, reaction on the Left is divided between the Church of Barack, who are delighted (maybe relieved) that The One has gained an unequivocal success (and who also take the opportunity to stick out their tongues at his predecessor), and the Angry Left, who are outraged by an “extra-judicial killing”. Omri Ceren considers what both camps would have said if Osama’s death had come at the hands of the Bushitler:
Feverish liberal conspiracy theorists would be beside themselves. “I question the timing” posts would dominate the liberal blogscape, with the theory being that Bin Laden’s capture was meant to distract the public from the President’s about-to-reach-a-tipping-point poll numbers or his about-to-definitively-fail Libya policy. Andrew Sullivan would be able to recycle his posts about Bush’s October Surprise that never happened. We could have gone in before, the argument would run, since we’d known about the compound for months. Or we should have gone in later, commentators would opine, since waiting would have allowed us us to collect intelligence while keeping Bin Laden bottled up.
The Truthers who make up more than half of the Democratic party would declare that either U.S. special forces didn’t shoot Bin Laden – why else dispose of the body in the ocean by 2:00 am ET – or that they intentionally killed him because he would have blown the lid off the 9/11 conspiracy if captured. After all, the Navy Seals took no injuries in the 40 minute raid. Why didn’t they just corner bin Laden and wait until he ran out of bullets? Or overwhelm him and take him from behind?
Media commentators would wring their hands about the flag waving and “USA! USA!” chanting that happened in front of the White House and Ground Zero. A bullet had just been put into a man’s head, and no matter how evil he was, weren’t these outbursts of patriotism somewhat macabre? Keep in mind that “flag waving patriotism” was until recently equivalent to exhibitionist jingoism in some corners of the sophisticated left (in other corners it stillis ). . . .
And while all of these are obviously counterfactuals that can never be tested, does anybody really believe that the left would be celebrating with such enthusiasm if Bush or a Republican successor was President? And if it’s even close, doesn’t that make the anti-Bush victory laps being run by liberal politicians and journalists – in addition to Ackerman, blogger JustKarl has assembled dozens of examples from some of the left’s “leading reality-based” lights – especially grating? Being a partisan hack just makes you a partisan hack. But spending eight years building the absolute dumbest pretexts for anti-Bush outrage, and insisting all the while that those pretexts were actually sophisticated principles about military strategy and democratic deliberation, and then ignoring those principles while acting like taunting schoolchildren – that seems to be something else entirely.
The burial at sea does perplex me. As Michael Yon says, “OBL was/is a powerful cult figure who has vanished with no ‘death certificate.’ His body should have been displayed. The only thing more powerful than a living cult leader is one who disappears off the face of the earth. Making his body disappear was a deadly blunder that plays straight into the hero myth. Joseph Campbell couldn’t have written a more terrible ending.”
Maybe there’s a rational explanation. It’s true that the mass murderer’s grave won’t now become a shrine, and his relics won’t be passed hand-to-hand by worshipful acolytes, but Osama’s sect, the Wahhabis, are famous for destroying relics and shrines. It would take a lot of cognitive dissonance to create either for this particular figure, when Mohammed’s supposed birthplace has been converted into a library!
It’s all too easy, on the other hand, to imagine a sort of “hidden Imam” legend springing up around Osama.
As for the strange notion that burial at sea shows respect for Moslem customs –
When was al-Qa’eda “sensitive” to the thousands whom it has killed?
Is there really a custom, in the interior of Pakistan, to bury anybody at sea? Le Figaro went to the trouble of asking Moslem legal experts and was told, not surprisingly, that Islam disapproves of the practice, except when someone dies on shipboard and can’t be brought to shore in time for a proper burial.
Be that as it may, the good and ill from this event lie in the future. Maybe Islamofascists around the world will be demoralized by this evidence of American persistence. Maybe they will stage horrifying revenge attacks. Maybe Pakistan will purge the Islamofascist sympathizers in its armed forces and intelligence agencies. Maybe it will swing solidly behind the enemy. At this moment, we don’t know.
What we do know is that Osama bin-Laden was just one of our enemies and that the war to preserve civilization against terrorist barbarism is still only, at best, at “the end of the beginning”.
Let us fight on.
Dear Tom,Sixty percent of Canadians-the percentage of voters in opposition to the Conservative-Christain Reform Party- are very worried that the Conservative majority signals more U.S.style politics in Canada: a focus on personality instead of policy(witness the Conservative use of attack adds),more deregulation of financial institutions,a weakening of a working health system by means of privatization and finally a simple minded philosophy of governance:less taxes and more jails.From the True North.Rick Ficek
Posted by: Rick Ficek | Tuesday, May 03, 2011 at 07:12 PM