On Bin Laden

I fell asleep around 10:30 with the BBC World Service playing on my laptop, which was resting on my bedside table, and I woke up some time later — I don’t know when — to the voice of Dan Damon (I think it was him) saying “Osama bin Laden is dead. The United States has recovered his body. We go now to the White House, where President Obama is preparing to speak.”

Later, Damon reported that jubilant crowds were gathering at the White House. I thought these might be images from a dream — bin Laden’s body carried from a mansion in a sheet, a celebratory party in Lafayette Square — but I was just awake enough to know they were not.

Still, even as I drifted from sleep to half-consciousness and back again, surfacing each time to take in more of the unfolding story, the celebratory party at the White House struck me as macabre. There was something unseemly, and even grotesque, about it.

I didn’t feel elated today. I felt, instead, a kind of displaced sadness. A sadness for the victims of 9/11, for the victims of the war we started in Iraq, and for the innocent victims of the conflict in Afghanistan. Sadness that a world could have someone like bin Laden in it, and that he could have such power. Sadness for the era that his killing brings to a symbolic close. It all seems so horrible. Maybe the most hopeful thing we can say about today is that for the first time that era feels like the past.

Bin Laden’s death seems symbolic of another turning point, one more profound than the end of the 9/11 era, as momentous as that is. Juan Cole put it well, in his blog Informed Comment:

The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don’t want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil.

If Obama can get us out of Iraq, and if he can use his good offices to keep the pressure on the Egyptian military to lighten up, and if he can support the likely UN declaration of a Palestinian state in September, the US will be in the most favorable position in the Arab world it has had since 1956. And he would go down in history as one of the great presidents. If he tries to stay in Iraq and he takes a stand against Palestine, he risks provoking further anti-American violence. He can be not just the president who killed Bin Laden, but the president who killed the pretexts for radical violence against the US. He can promote the waving of the American flag in major Arab cities. And that would be a defeat and humiliation for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda more profound than any they could have dreamed.