A journal of political, social, and other important, possibly even somewhat related affairs, including but not limited to: Central European Society, The European Union, HC Kometa Brno, American Politics, Film, and Beer.

05 May 2011

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden is dead, and the world is a better place now that he is gone. The news was delivered to me Monday morning over my cheap Chinese radio, and I wasn't completely certain I had heard it correctly. (For the technical details, I'm sure Drudge will be a better source than this blog.) I was in a hurry for work, listening in the shower, in Czech, and only later did I get all caught up on the various details. It turns out they're trickling out bit by bit.

It feels, well, strange, and a little anticlimactic. I don't particularly feel terrific about it the way I feel like I'm supposed to. Obviously, I'm glad, and maybe if we captured him alive I would have the time to really work up the outrage. But Ramesh Ponnuru in this post beat me to fleshing out a lot of my own feelings (and Kathryn Jean Lopez offered some initial response here), and so when I heard the news, I smiled, and I was proud of the Americans who conducted the raid, but I didn't laugh, I didn't pump my fist, and I didn't announce it from the rooftop. I did keep a promise to Osama I made nine years ago and drank a couple glasses of Jack Daniel's. I was glad because I felt justice being served, but I also was reminded that justice is not always an easy thing, even if it is an obvious thing.

It seems more like we've adopted a more workmanlike attitude to the GWOT (am I still allowed to use this acronym?) than we had in October 2001, which I have mixed feelings about. I feel less and less the urgency of solving this problem this very week, today, immediately, and while I think we always knew this would be a long war, I wish it didn't feel sometimes like emptying the world's gutters and septic tanks. I don't say this to put down the men and women we have completing these odious yet necessary tasks, and heaven knows that there will be more great milestones which we will look back on as we see liberal, democratic, accountable government take root in the Middle East. But the friends we all still have in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere will continue to have many days of "just" "routine" "maintenance."

This has two aspects. First off, our fighting men and women have become more professional and effective in their tasks. We as a fighting nation are more capable of dispatching those who would use radical Islam to threaten our security, our interests, and our values. Your correspondent is no military expert, and it would be horribly presumptuous to supply all sorts of details. Nevertheless, it's not pretty, but we've learned a lot as a country, often terribly tragically, in the past ten years. We understand strategy as well as tactics better; it is critical that we persevere.

On the other hand, moving away from urgency and starting the Long War will be more difficult politically. We will be tempted occasionally to defer our responsibilities, perhaps out of misplaced compassion, or a naive faith in "the international community," or just the occasional exhaustion and frustration that comes from a protracted and sometimes seemingly thankless Sisyphean job. But it is critical that we persevere.

The very same day that Navy SEALs were dispensing justice in a remote village in Pakistan, Czech nationalists and neo-Nazis were rallying against those same universal freedoms bin Laden himself was working to destroy. They were surrounded by police, who were spaced between them and the protesters who came out to affirm those liberal values. The good news is that there were more protesters than neo-Nazis; it is critical that we persevere.

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