Ten years after President George W Bush reduced the attack on New York’s twin towers to the bathos of a Wild West movie with his reference to “Dead or Alive” posters, a posse of the United State’s finest delivered justice in the only way that cinema genre has led us to expect. And, apparently in the only way a large majority of American citizens desired. Dead, not alive.
Having declared war on the Western world to become America’s most wanted man, it is hardly surprising that Osama bin Laden’s life ended this way. His terrorism brought death and suffering (not to mention attendant draconian “anti-terror” laws) to many countries and there will be few outside his own followers who will mourn that he no longer enjoys the freedom to draw breath.
Americans – and many others, including the Islamic victims of 9/11 – have the right to mourn for those who died in that atrocity. But the cheers which rise with the opinion poll ratings of President Barack Obama, needs to be followed by a pause for reflection.
What will the death of bin Laden have achieved apart form the reflex trigger release of some national catharsis and temporary unity? Will it bring closure, or just the end of the opening chapter in the “war on terror” – a war, as many commentators described it, on an abstract noun. “Killing bin Laden is the end of the ‘war on terror’”, said Peter Bergen, a respected CNN pundit on terrorism. Only if one side stands down. All indications, and all national leaders, warn their populations to be even more “vigilant” in the expectation of an al Qaida backlash.
Like the execution of Saddam Hussein, the extra-judicial summary execution of bin Laden – the nominal head of an fragmented organisation with declining influence will change little in practice while begging ever more pressing questions about what the Western powers are doing in Afghanistan. The protesters behind the Arab Spring cry out for freedom and democracy not jihad.
President Obama is wrong – although not in the eyes of the American people – to talk about justice having “been done”. Murder does not deliver justice. It only delivers death.
What the American people got was vengeance not justice, an understandable human desire given the character of the attacks on the twin towers. But vengeance, served up in particularly cold-blooded form in this case, is neither a substitute for foreign policy nor an exhibit of justice, seen to be done. And if it is justice that is being sought, where is the justice for all those innocent Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani civilians killed, accidentally, erroneously or carelessly in the “war on terror”, a phrase now widely seen as a huge mistake since it united rather than divided the West’s perceived enemies?
The sight of Osama bin Laden in the dock of the International Criminal Court – a judiciary the United States refuses to recognise – would have been more humiliating and possibly more illuminating than a dead body at the bottom of the sea.
