Taylerama

Killing Osama bin Laden and Watching the War on Terror

Look, I’m glad the bastard’s dead. Thrilled.

And like everyone else, I’m impressed — awed — by how the operation played out. In the last four or five days, Obama made a succession of bold decisions that made his dithering during the Arab Spring look even more limp-wristed: green-lighting the strike without, it seems, definite confirmation that bin Laden was in that compound; opting for a tactical assault rather than a less-precise bombing; ignoring critics who have disapproved of our unilateral actions in and around Pakistan and, it seems, taking our shot without asking for permission we didn’t need; and finally, sparing us the spectacle of a martyred bin Laden on trial (New York City, perhaps?) or buried at some shrine-in-waiting by executing bin Laden and, respectfully, according to Muslim tradition, dumping his wretched body into the ocean, where no virgins await him.

I don’t need to see pictures of bin Laden’s splatto mug anymore than I need to see Obama’s long-form birth certificate. He’s dead, and I’m glad he’s dead. This is all great. Really.

But the cheering; the Star-Spangled-Bannering, America - FUCK YEAH!

I don’t feel it.

Relief was my immediate emotion, then a sullen detachment from the joy I saw on TV. I kept waiting for the FUCK YEAH! to kick in. It didn’t. So many dead, so many resources expended, so much hate and invective, all because of one man’s blasphemous madness. Now that one man was gone. And the rest of it?

9/11 was a transformative historical moment. I’m not convinced that bin Laden’s death is, especially if you can separate the man from his symbolic power, which is, of course, impossible. He was, as Owen Gleiberman commented on EW.com, our boogie-man, the heavy in America’s most profound post-war drama whose serene visage and defiant evasion of history’s mightiest superpower gave him an almost romantic mythos. Bin Laden’s death now exists in our collective unconscious as the thrilling final reel of the 21st Century’s ur-epic: an elite commando squad flying into unfriendly airspace, a helicopter explosion, a 40 minute firefight at a secret lair, a terrified wife identifying her husband, and a cold, clean “double-tap.”

End scene.

As the credits rolled, audiences erupted in New York and D.C. We, collectively, were happy and united in a way we hadn’t been since 9/11. Happy, and more, satisfied. Maybe the movie was too long by half, and it certainly cost too much, but the ending didn’t let us down. We got what we wanted. The good guys killed the bad guy.

Watching all that spontaneous jubilation, the uninformed observer might think we’d just won a war. We haven’t, let alone won two. My suspicion, and my concern, is that the euphoric explosion triggered by the killing of a single terrorist with bad kidneys and, at best, limited operational command over his fractious network is symptomatic of an impossible want that has colored our perceptions of the War on Terror and those waging it for the past decade: the want for a simple, blockbuster ending that’s as definitive the beginning. We know when this all started — 9/11’s unimaginable opening salvo playing out for weeks as the ultimate reality TV event — and we wanted an ending to match. Now we have it, and fittingly, the defining image of bin Laden’s death is a photo of people watching it happen in real time, the perfect mirror image to the 9/11 experience outside of New York and D.C.

End scene.

With most movies, it’s the middle that matters, and this one got messy. As the years dragged on, the mission broadened, and our frustrations grew, critics submitted the same script notes over and over again: Why haven’t we caught bin Laden? Where are Saddam’s WMDs, and what did that have to do with 9/11 in the first place?

It’s human nature to boil complex problems down to easy solutions. Social Security is going broke? Medicare is unsustainable? Tax the rich, say the Democrats. Create a voucher system, say the Republicans. These kinds of ideas comfort us, as they also divide us because of the certainty they provide — Why can’t you see how simple this is, you moron?

The horrors of war, any war, are so beyond the comprehension and experience of those of us watching from the balcony that these simple answers are even more attractive. In fact, we’re trained to think about war in such terms. Any child knows the Civil War was about slavery, any high schooler can tell you that World War I started because the Black Hand killed Franz Ferdinand. And so the simplest response to 9/11 was to capture or kill bin Laden (which involved deposing the Afghan Taliban when they wouldn’t turn him over), and then find Saddam’s nukes, two big, juicy plot points to drive Act II.

Except, of course, the Civil War was about much more than just slavery, and the cause of World War I is so complicated that even World War I scholars haven’t sorted it out.

Most proponents of the War on Terror — myself included — never cared much that we didn’t find nukes in Iraq, or that bin Laden managed to scuttle from cave to cave (to mansion, it seems) with the blessing of complicit tribal leaders and, no doubt, a couple shady governments. These were plot points, yes, but they were never THE point. Destroying state-sponsored terrorism was THE point.

To that end, no serious response to 9/11 would have excluded Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, or Iran (Afghanistan of course was “the good war,” worth supporting until it was no longer politically advantageous to do so). The invasion of Iraq freaked Syria out, and they withdrew from Lebanon. Similarly freaked, Gaddafi turned over a whole bunch of nuclear weapons he, uhh, found lying around in Libya (imagine if he had those right now). Bush tried to forge a better relationship with Pakistan (fail, it seems) and pressure Iran with sanctions and overtures to its cosmopolitan dissidents (ehh …).

As for Iraq, since 2003 we have uncovered voluminous evidence that Saddam was one of the leading financiers of global terrorism — including al Qaeda — that he allowed top al Qaeda operatives to use northern Iraq as a staging and training ground, that he had troves of chemical weapons (capable of causing destruction on a massive scale — “weapons of mass destruction,” if you will), and that he tried to buy … uh … something from Niger… a country whose only noteworthy resource is uranium … To say nothing of the genocide he perpetrated on his own people for decades.

These facts were reported under headlines screaming “No smoking gun,” an image right out of a ‘40s potboiler or a rerun of “Law and Order.” Nukes and bin Laden were the big plot points, the clear and present dangers that overwhelmed all these niggling little threats to our security, like the actual infrastructure of global terror and the overwhelming complexities involved in dismantling it. That’s not a movie: that’s a long, involved documentary. Sounds like work. Give us a smoking gun so we can kill the man holding it.

Bush is as much to blame for this grand, cinematic simplification of the War on Terror as anyone. His administration emphasized the WMDs as repeatedly as the New York Times or MSNBC did. He assured us a swift, valedictory triumph in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He cast himself as a swaggering “war President,” John Wayne scouring the desert for the Man in Black, leading his troops behind enemy lines to find the bad guy’s secret bunker where they would destroy his secret arsenal and light their victory cigars in the flames.

End scene.

Bush deserves criticism for all this, for bungling two winnable wars with short-sighted planning, arrogance, and a devotion to incompetent loyalists, at the cost of thousands of American and civilian lives, and for the testiness and in-fighting within our intelligence community that aided bin Laden’s flight … Just as he deserves credit for the Surge, for appreciating the broader scope of this battle, and for believing that all people — including Arab people — want democracy, even as liberals clamored for multicultural “tolerance” of theocratic despots.
 
Obama deserves credit for authorizing SEAL Team 6 to do what needed to be done, for opening himself up to a second-term-killing shitstorm of criticism had something gone wrong, for, it seems, putting people in place who could resolve those Bush-era intelligence fissures, for, yes, killing bin Laden … Just as he deserves criticism for his embarrassing post-election Middle East apology tour, his abandonment of the Iranian Green Movement, his straining of our relationship with Israel, and the “pragmatic” incoherence of his response to the Arab uprisings.

Bill Clinton deserves criticism for failing to capture bin Laden after the 1998 embassy bombings, and for half-heartedly lobbing a few missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan in response … Just as he deserves credit for … for …

Hold on, I’m thinking …

Would public opinion have turned as sharply on Bush had he captured or killed bin Laden? If WMDs were found in Iraq? My feeling is no, based on conversations with people on both sides of these issues over the years, and based on the celebrations we saw at the beginning of the week. We wanted to catch the bad guys. Hitting the plot points became bigger than the big picture.

That big picture continues to unfold in the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq and across the Middle East, where our soldiers risk their lives, and ordinary citizens demand basic rights, basic freedoms that Bush was mocked for believing they wanted. Women voting in Afghanistan is a far more significant, if less action-packed, American accomplishment than putting two in bin Laden’s head ten years after 9/11. It’s also a far more fragile accomplishment, and one every bit as deserving of our praise, and our on-going commitment.

I’m not chiding anyone for what they’re feeling right now, and I certainly don’t think it’s wrong to celebrate bin Laden’s death. After this long, horrible slog, Americans deserve whatever measure of peace or joy this justice brought them. At the end of Obama’s inevitable sequel, I hope those same citizens can cheer America’s efforts to promote and preserve liberty where it is most threatened, and relegate bin Laden to history’s cutting room floor, where his murderous perversion of God’s will belongs.

To be continued.