Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama: To Take Life, to Give Death

These past few days, we have been able to read some crucial analyses on the strategic consequences of Osama bin Laden’s death. However, they all leave in the shadows one aspect in which death plays a part, as always among humans: the symbolic axis.

This symbolic axis must show all that is similar between the two crucial moments that happened a decade apart: Sept. 11 in the New York morning and May 2 in the Abbottabad night.

What is similar: almost everything. In a troubling parallel of forms, in both cases death came from the sky, as if it was wanted by something other than human forces. Two planes in the New York sky, four helicopters in the Pakistani night. The same meticulous hyper-technologic preparation to achieve the one goal: death.

Ten years ago, the whole world watched the crime on their screens, and bin Laden himself must have witnessed these deaths that he commissioned. Ten years later, this spectacular photograph was published in the press: At the White House, Barack Obama, with an anguished look on his face, is watching live his elite unit risk their lives to execute the death sentence America pronounced.

Everything seems as if the United States had decided to impose on bin Laden a task symmetrical to the one he once imposed on them: The sky opens up, and death swoops down on its victims, implacable, leaving them no chance, exposed for everyone to see, especially for the one who declared it to see.

Symbolically, with 10 years in between them, could bin Laden’s death be the most perfect vengeance since Achilles revenged Patroclus by dragging Hector’s body around Troy’s fortifications? No. To see bin Laden’s death as vengeance would be to forget what sets apart, in a human society, the intention of “giving death” from the one of “taking life.”

Ten years ago, the intention was obviously to “take” thousands of lives, to steal them, to pillage them. When it comes to bin Laden, his life was not taken: He was given death. Barack Obama could have teleguided drones from California that would have destroyed dozens of lives (including the nine women and 23 children who lived in the Abottabad mansion). He could have taken dozens of lives to, in the end, take the one and only.

But he preferred to put his soldiers’ lives in danger: He commanded them to penetrate Osama’s den, creating the final hand-to-hand fight with his enemy. America wanted to give bin Laden his death and preferred to risk lives of its own rather than take lives from others.

What does it mean to “give” something like death? The gift, as opposed to the exchange, does not call for any reciprocity: What is given is given. When life is taken, the murder of a man calls for vengeance from the survivors. The circle of vengeance never ends. Romeo and Juliet must “give each other death” so that the bloodbath between the Capulets and the Montagues ends.

By giving bin Laden death, Barack Obama interrupted the circle. It is uncertain whether America consciously recognizes the symbolic aspect of the act it just carried out. By giving bin Laden death, without taking innocents’ lives, America finally found the light at the end of the tunnel where it had abruptly entered in 2001 by yielding to the temptation of fighting terror with weapons of terror.

We must imagine the dread of those that have been swearing loyalty to bin Laden for 10 years. In the night of May 2, they lost their trump card: not their chief, but their symbolic supremacy. Since Sept. 11, what could we do against men ready to sacrifice their lives to take someone else’s life? From now on, what can terrorists do against a superpower that, in the night and in cold blood, chose to give death to the one out of respect for the life of another?