In a perfect world – that is, in a world created solely for the convenience and amusement of journalists and satirists – it would have been done much more neatly. So, after the US Navy Seals had secured the compound and slotted Osama and four of his henchpersons, battalions of democracy’s finest paparazzi would have swarmed into the adjoining outbuildings and found Wills and Kate tucked up in bed in their secret honeymoon hideaway love nest.
Not that I’m suggesting for one single second any connection whatsoever between the summary justice served on bin Laden and the palpable joy that spread round the world courtesy of the royal wedding. Beyond, that is, their proximity in the news cycle. And the central role played in both by the armed forces. Oh, and don’t forget the fact that neither event rings entirely true.
Again, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that the whole farrago didn’t quite work as intended, because it played false to its basic premise. Which, in case you’ve forgotten in all this excitement, is to buttress the irrelevant with a massively disproportionate show of military might. Add pomp and pageantry, and with the royal wedding we had yet another world-beating display of the breathtaking powers of British hypocrisy.
Of course, in this monumental exercise in dissembling, everything has to be done properly, and that includes what the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts praised on the radio (in a link from the United States, ironically) as the magical spectacle of heavily armed men marching robotically in step through heavily populated civilian areas.
But it also means the hypocrisy must colour every aspect of the charade, from the strutting, swaggering militarism of a lost empire and the Puss-in-Boots cozzies of a dead feudalism, bigged up by the establishment to cow, beguile or bamboozle the rest of us into submission, to the facade of any affection at all sparking between the main protagonists.
My Guardian colleague Michael White described poor bloody Diana Spencer, at the time of her sham marriage to Prince Charles 30 years ago, as being like a virgin chained to a rock, and at the time, however much we pretended otherwise, we all secretly knew she was being offered up for sacrifice to
keep up the appearances of our dumpy and dysfunctional royal family.
Her son, however, shows every appearance of being genuinely in love with the former Miss Kate Middleton. In the light of that startling revelation, the irrelevancy somehow changes polarity, and the carriages and marching bands and all the rest of the flummery suddenly look like the redundant part, laden with as much meaning as any other over-the-top accessory at your average modern wedding.
Still, those were real guns being carried in that magnificently martial choreography and could, I suppose, have been turned on the crowd if it turned ugly. Which takes us back to Osama bin Laden.
Once more, please, indulge me. I’m no apologist for bin Laden or his followers and supporters. He was a dilettante playboy turned religious maniac, whose jihad had nothing to do with winning justice for Palestine or the people of the Umma or anything much beyond universalising his own fear and hatred of the “other”, enshrined in his desire to recreate a hegemonic despotism, allegedly sanctioned by God, as bad as and almost certainly much worse than all the others. That said, I would have been happier had he stood trial in The Hague, rather than being executed without any hint of a trial to make America feel good, and Barack Obama look better.
But it’s that American triumphalism that doesn’t quite ring true, rather than the circumstances of bin Laden’s demise. Remember, aside from his many crimes and vile opinions, he played a role in Afghanistan in precipitating the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union, and his subsequent career both humiliated and diminished the US.
America, thanks to the actions of bin Laden and his acolytes, is a very different place to the self-appointed world policeman standing in monolithic majesty as the “world’s only remaining superpower” that it was in the early 1990s.
After September 11, however, and partly because George W Bush was also a dilettante playboy turned religious maniac, bin Laden succeeded in goading America into endless, unwinnable “wars on terror” – conflicts which it pursued with such lumbering incompetence and brutality that its reputation as “the last best hope of mankind” now lies in tatters.
So long after the initial crime, his assassination now begins to look like the dogged petulance of the increasingly impotent. His death won’t sort out the Middle East, now entering a dynamic which has nothing to do with al Qaida’s brand of murderous nostalgia. Nor will it sort out Afghanistan. Nor will it stop terrorism, nor slow down America’s inevitable decline.
So I wonder how China – Britain and America’s successor as next global hegemon – would have dealt with someone like bin Laden had they found themselves in similar circumstances. And I can’t help thinking that they’d probably have carpet-bombed Mecca, captured Osama after months and sewn him into a pig-skin in Tiananmen Square on live television before turning back to more important and pressing concerns.
Which would leave the Americans parading drones and cluster bombs and the other arcane paraphernalia of their increasingly irrelevant military-industrial complex down Pennsylvania Avenue as a picturesque adjunct to the tourism industry, just like we do.
