A Place in the Light

Is it truly a better world without Osama bin Laden, as Barack Obama triumphantly assured while announcing the happy ending of one of the fiercest and longest political police hunts in history?

Yes, no doubt, but not without some still unfulfilled hope. Of course, what was most heartening in the commando raid that ended the al-Qaida leader’s career is the blow that, though late, was brought onto an insolent impunity that was exemplified in his episodic television appearances. It’s the administration of a just punishment, as moralists prefer to say, in a war against terrorism where morality, however, has no more room on one side of the barricade than the other.

Even though they’ve been beheaded (without their charismatic leader, they also lose their main source of funding), al-Qaida has not yet been annihilated, and they still remain capable of causing harm. But it has already been some time since this extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism lost the attractive power that might have taken hold in an Arab world won over by frustration, despair and anger. Al-Qaida declared a holy war not only against the United States and Israel, but also against Arab regimes described as being wicked or imperialist lackeys. And yet we have found better since; better, more noble and certainly more effective than blind terror, than mass murder, crimes that no religion can justify — it is the peaceful and unarmed revolt of people against the dictatorships that have governed them for decades.

The only viable alternative to the obscurantism of the al-Qaida killer, is the luminous light of the Arab spring — this spring on its way to destroying the myth of the dictatorships allied with the West, or at least courted by them as the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism. It’s this double observation that the Western powers, who we see providing favors so unevenly during the current uprisings, impose today: massive and sometimes abusive engagement here, troubling caution there — a caution bordering on passivity. Is this the way that democracy can be established for the essential features to remain one and indivisible in all latitudes?

The least worthy of compassion is one of the busiest former terrorists, Moammar Gadhafi. The fact remains that the NATO air strikes in Libya were sanctioned by the U.N. with the explicit purpose of protecting civilians, not of physically eliminating the Libyan president, whose son and three grandchildren were killed by the bombs. But what then of the bombarded civilians, the pocked, bludgeoned, besieged, hungry and thirsty — all sad exploits that Washington thinks to sanction by ordering a great freeze of some assets on American soil?