America’s Halali*

Joy, celebration, self-congratulation, and triumph: The United States and the world won’t soon forget this [coming] May first. A few months before the tenth anniversary of the bloodbath in New York, President Obama went on the air to announce the liquidation of Osama bin Laden. “Justice has been done,” he said. Bin Laden is generally considered to be the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and is an icon of the radical Muslim enemies of the West.

With bin Laden’s death, Obama celebrated the greatest triumph of a presidency that had been increasingly slipping into disarray: On the domestic front — healthcare reform, unemployment, budget cutbacks, the economy, massive debt — almost everything had gone awry. The success in Pakistan gave Obama an unexpected present: Eighteen months before the [2012] elections, any criticism of his leadership ability and resolve, as well as of the validity of his foreign and security policies, had been silenced.

Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, had, cowboy-like, promised he would bring bin Laden to justice, “dead or alive.” Bush hoped to justify his invasion of Afghanistan and his aggression in Iraq with revenge on bin Laden. What developed out of that — torture and the trampling of civil rights, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib — were the exact things that finally alienated the rest of the world from the United States and eventually made implausible America’s promise to be the guardian of human rights, democracy and freedom.

A Beacon of Hope for an Insecure Country

What his predecessor had been unable to achieve, Obama hit right on target. During the election campaign he had promised, “We will kill bin Laden.” But keeping this promise had begun to look less and less likely as time passed. After nearly 10 wasted years during which bin Laden’s trail grew colder and amidst self-doubt and speculation of a possible failure of the United States, Obama had a hymn to sing to “God’s own country”: “We were reminded again that there is a pride in what this nation stands for, and what we can achieve,” Obama said.

A beacon of hope for an insecure country! Perhaps the Americans had to get bin Laden in order to find satisfaction, but his importance had long since faded. Those in Washington knew that neither al-Qaida nor terrorism had died along with him. A hydra always grows a new head when one is cut off, and it needs neither a new bin Laden nor an al-Qaida. The latter had already morphed into a loose and amorphous structure years ago. Its motto today is “One man, one bomb.” If there is still such an organization as al-Qaida, it looks today more like a franchise operation.

Thus, every country has a “terror cell.” After the arrest in Germany of three Moroccans on suspicion of planning bomb attacks, German officials admitted that more than 200 German passport holders had visited training camps in the tribal areas [in Pakistan and/or Afghanistan] and many had since returned to Germany.

Perhaps it would have been preferable for the Americans to have captured bin Laden and tried him in court; that would certainly have fulfilled the rule of law better than a couple of bullets fired by the commando team. But a trial held by a constitutional government not only might have revealed details about the planning that went into the 9/11 attacks, it might also have impeded the creation of a new [American] legend.

“An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth”

However, the Americans didn’t put much stock in taking the route of giving bin Laden a first-class, rule of law, test case. To give him a court-appointed lawyer and be forced to defend its actions and have unpleasant truths emerge … Perhaps to be forced to free him because of the lack of hard evidence? Moreover, we can only suspect that something bin Laden might have said could have run contrary to the American version of events.

Yet bin Laden’s attack of the century in 2001 had touched a deeper, atavistic layer in America’s consciousness. That his cold-blooded liquidation and the disappearance of his body without a trace were both openly celebrated shows just how deeply the feeling of humiliation al-Qaida’s successful air attack in New York had eaten into the American soul. Despite the fact that Americans are the undisputed masters of delivering airborne death, they had never before in history experienced what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a “terror bombing.”

Whether the Abbottabad attack is ever seen as justified by the rest of the world is irrelevant to the United States. Americans found “an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth” to be a just sentence for bin Laden. They had the power and they used it. The open account with the world’s most wanted terrorist has been closed.

*Wikipedia translates “Halali” as: “the signal blown on the horn marking the end of a hunt by horse.”