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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > May > 04 > Entry
Editorial: For Americans, this was personal
What, one might reasonably ask, is the big deal about finding and killing one man?
After all, international affairs is not chess, wherein the war ends when you kill the king. And yet the post-9/11 war on terror did take on elements of chess. The United States announced quickly that it was going after Osama bin Laden personally. His friends responded by putting a protective wall around him, moving him when necessary and glorying in the fact that he was still alive.
Having announced its intentions — under two presidents — the United States had to succeed. It had spelled out the rules. True, the world has moved on from defining military victory as killing the leader of the other side.
But Osama bin Laden was a special case. He was not the leader of any country. He celebrated killing for the sake of killing — toward the goal of sparking more killing.
His deluded minions could undertake the work anyplace at the expense of anybody. His demise was sought not just by Washington, but by leaders and people all over the world, including, you can be sure, many who wouldn’t speak up.
Merely capturing him would have enhanced his stature as a symbol, would have made him a center of far more attention, a rallying point. Terrorists might have taken innocent people as hostages to bargain for his release, and might have killed them.
The best news about his demise is what surrounds it in 2011. The people of the Arab world have arisen as never before. The uprising has not been in the form of a bloodthirsty cry for vengeance, not in pursuit of the bin Laden vision. It’s been in pursuit of democracy and freedom.
The man’s time passed before he passed.
His al-Qaida is still extant, with tentacles in much of the world. But its efforts have been foiled repeatedly — in Times Square, in airports, elsewhere — and have lacked the sweep and resources of the 9/11 attack.
The threat now, of course, is that bin Laden’s death will spark retaliatory terrorist efforts. But experts on terrorist organizations are remarkably united in seeing his death as an important blow to al-Qaida, as a real turning point, not just as a symbol.
Hopefully, his absence from the scene will give new strength to those in the Muslim world who want constructive relations with the West, who see the pointlessness of the politics of destruction.
The potential for that kind of change is — more perhaps than anything else — what makes this event worthy of the attention it’s received.
For Americans, though, this is personal. Osama bin Laden was the epitome of evil in our time, no less evil because he wrapped his message in self-righteousness and a perversion of religion. The death of one man doesn’t necessarily change the world. Nevertheless, the wicked witch is dead, and that’s something.
Credit for the competence and bravery of the military action and the long-delayed success of the intelligence community belongs to the professionals, not the president. What his administration does deserve credit for is keeping the whole thing secret. The decision pended for a long time, and countless people were involved. Lives were riding on this being a stealth mission.
When President Barack Obama pulled the metaphorical trigger, after he was convinced that the operation was well conceived — an operation that saw the deaths of no Americans or uninvolved civilians — he acted just as the American people expect their president to act.
Perhaps now the political warriors in this country who love playing with the similarity of the names Osama and Obama will desist; but don’t count on it.
In truth, there’s a poetic poignancy to the similarity of the names and disparity of the visions. If fate could pick the name of an American president to rid the world of Osama bin Laden, it couldn’t do better than Barack Hussein Obama.
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