Obama and Bush, Same Fight

Democracy fights against terrorism with one hand tied behind its back, but not both as some claim. Thus, an operation ordered by the U.S. president to, in his own words, capture and judge the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks, resulted, predictably, with the death of the criminal Osama bin Laden. And nobody — nobody in the civilized world and even the other world — is sorry about that outcome. Only the Islamists who control Gaza, and a certain disoriented newspaper here in Spain used the term “murder” for an action whose meaning Obama put this way: “Justice has been done.”

Those who wanted and expected the United States to cease the fighting the “War on Terror” — as defined by Obama’s predecessor — will have found a new disappointment. Obama has finished a job that George W. Bush had begun, and we are lucky that it has happened this way. Thanks to this change of occupants in the White House, we will hold off on hysterical allegations about the illegality of the operation, which was a “targeted assassination” and on foreign soil, no less, requests to investigate whether Navy Seals read out to bin Laden his rights before shooting, and claims that Washington D.C. should be judged for another crime. Even the Spanish Socialist Party, which created so much condemnation and derision of the War on Terror, welcomed the action, but first cited , as a whitening agent, the progressive saint’s name.

Since not all can be seen through rose-colored glasses, the pessimists warn of reprisals to come, as they stated that 9/11 was a reprisal — deserved, they claimed — for the abuse inflicted by the great liberal power on the Islamic world. And, gloomily, they claim something evident: that the death of bin Laden is not the end of his organization. Maybe. But the only road leading to that horizon is the terrorists paying a high price for their actions. “We will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed,” the president said last night. Such was the meaning of the celebrations that took place in Washington D.C. and New York, where people chanted “USA, USA”: the same clamor that greeted Bush at ground zero in 2001. Obama’s nation has fulfilled its duty to pursue relentlessly those who seek to destroy it. Too bad others agree to a truce at the slightest chance.