Imagine it is exactly eight years ago. President Bush has just stood in a flight-suit on an aircraft carrier and told us that major combat operations in Iraq are over. In the backdrop was a giant banner with ‘Mission Accomplished’ written across it. Then Marty McFly shows up in a DeLorean and shows you the following headline from eight years in the future:
President Who? It took that long?
It’s never easy to predict the future; that is for sure.
I am very happy that we finally got Usama bin-Laden. It’s tempting to gloat that it was a Democrat who finally got it done…Dick Cheney was too busy shooting his friends, etc. But that’s kind of petty. This is a good moment for all Americans. I was touched personally by the attacks. A co-worker lost his brother. My secretary lost a family friend. People were killed from my parent’s church. One of the heroes of Flight 93 lived in the town next to mine. I grew up in the New York suburbs. My father commuted there every day. It was always my playground and my first love. I’m extremely gratified that a degree of justice has been meted out.
I could talk about how much 9/11 warped our country and screwed up our priorities and even our morals. I could talk about how little this one death will matter in the bigger picture. But you know all that. Tonight’s a night to just celebrate. Tomorrow we can talk about what it all means in context. And about whether Mitt Romney still wants to run for president.
Yup. Agreed on all counts. Except for the allegation that Cheney had friends – acquaintances seems more appropriate.
You may want to retract your self-criticism of your funny ass hell comment about Cheney after braving a few minutes at Hot Air. Those “true patriots” are pissed!!!!
the folks outside the WH are making me tear up
A happy night? Well, I guess for some people it is and I certainly don’t begrudge them.
But I personally am taking my cues from the President’s announcement. No “victory” or “triumph” or “mission accomplished.” Simply “justice has been done.”
And tomorrow the work of rebuilding the country continues.
Although I couldn’t help noticing that this announcement cut into Celebrity Apprentice.
And ABC had to do the usual “let’s see if we can manage to fill a whole hour with bin Laden stuff” and entirely preempted Desperate Housewives, one of my guilty pleasures.
OK, now I know you’re a troll.
Yes, she is. Quite twisted, I’d say.
The murder* of bin Laden by the United States of America will not change a thing, really, except that it will bring a lot of political capital Obama’s way.
No, that’s not right. It WILL change things at least for a while, since it’s a great excuse to increase restrictions on civil rights for everyone, and brazenly violate the civil rights of Arabs, Muslims, and “Middle-Eastern-appearing” people, and further erode all those great freedoms bin Laden and his followers supposedly “hate us” for.
* OK, bring on the allegations that I have a crush on bin Laden. I’m used to hearing this kind of thing when I call pre-meditated killing without due process what it is.
“pre-meditated killing without due process” is what bin-Laden specialized in. Except he usually killed people who were entirely innocent. How were we supposed to stop him or bring him to justice if he was going to resist?
Oh, come on! I realize it is very late where you are, but that is no excuse for losing your mind completely. Since when is what you just presented an argument worth making?
Get a good night’s sleep and try again.
Losing my mind completely?
It seems that it is you who have lost your mind completely. This man has been in hiding for a decade with the blood of thousands on his hands.
And, when found, there was a firefight.
How he was supposed to get due process under those circumstances is a mystery, indeed.
You are very concerned about the rights of mass murderers like Gaddafi, Assad, and bin-Laden. You show zero concern for their victims.
Bullshit. You don’t understand me at all.
maybe not, but I’d like to see you freaking out about how Assad is behaving. You are not.
I never see you upset at all about how any Muslim leader or group is behaving.
It’s all double-standards.
Sometimes it is just about balance. The traditional media provide enough Ghaddafi/Assad attacks on HR. They give others a pass most of the time and none of them are going to say someone like bin-Laden should have rights and yet in a developed democracy with formal equality of all and due process they should have however unpopular that is.
Of course Ghaddafi, Assad, Mubarak, the Bahraini, Yemeni and Saudi psychopathic leaders etc are all mass human rights abusers as we all know (some of those get a pass too). Of course bin-Laden is a mass murderer by his own admission. I seriously doubt anyone is going to deny any of that. However, there are many around the world who see Bush in a similar light and Obama not much better and then there are the Israeli leaders. It is often a matter of where you are standing and how it affects you which is no doubt why many Americans will be celebrating today.
And when talking of double standards, how many celebrating today would do so if say Bush or Netanyahu were taken out for all the death of innocents they have caused? And in both cases many people worldwide believe they deliberately target innocents. Everyone has a different perspective and sometimes that perspective can be incredibly unpopular but that doesnt mean there isnt a point. Today Osama is dead and gone. Tomorrow there is another one and that is the way it is until the underlying problems are resolved, but there is no attempt at that.
For context, she has been explaining to us that Mr. Bashir Assad is an overwhelmingly popular leader with his own people and that he would surely win a free and fair election, and that he isn’t really responsible for the goons in his government who are gunning down peaceful protesters by the hundreds.
So, while you have a point, I also have a point.
Until recent events there were in fact quite a few Syrians who saw Assad as a possible reformer. Indeed the early protests made the assumption that, given the mood elsewhere and the events in Egypt, that Assad would push the Baath oligarchy for reform. That he has followed his dad’s tactics is as unsurprising as how fast Saif al-Islam Gaddafi lost his interest in democratic transformation of dictatorships.
Well, yes, it is true that it was assumed by many that the son was more enlightened than the father. That doesn’t change the fact the protests erupted against the man and that he responded with horrible brutality. He is evidently not as popular as she thought. And she has not one word of condemnation for him, but rather makes excuses and even offers praise.
Allah Ackbar.
Bin Laden has admitted to helping plot the 9/11 attack. I’ll take him at his word.
Those ~3,000 men, women, and children deserved justice. Osama Bin Laden lived by the sword and died by the sword. There was no other way around it.
personal memory of the time, I must comment upon this rewriting of history.
Actually, no one claimed credit for “9/11”–which made it very peculiar for terror attacks of the time.
Guns shot back and forth. OBL was never going to let himself being taken alive.
Right on point.
Thank you, Hurria.
AG
A justified killing is not murder.
Usama bin Laden killed thousands, and deserved death. I would have prefered that he be strangled in the public square, but I’ll take this outcome.
A humorous aside; here’s the first line of your previous post-
“I’m having trouble finding anything that I want to write about today.”
I know.
Here is how this went down. One of my stepsons called. He lives with his father and he saw that Obama was supposed to give a speech in 10 minutes. He wanted me to tell him what it was going to be about. I was in the basement moving laundry. I had been watching The Borgias and had no idea what the announcement was going to be about.
I came upstairs and turned on the teevee. It was already announcing that Usama was dead. I thought, “Jesus, and the post that is up says I can’t find anything the write about!”
Execution without even a pretense at due process is justice, is it? How very “progressive”.
I can understand why some people might be feeling vindicated and all that, but let’s not pretend that this had anything to do with justice, please, and especially not while proudly calling ourselves progressives.
Please. He could have turned himself in to some other authority. Say, the International Criminal Court. He didn’t. It’s not ‘progressive’ to fail to track down and kill terrorists who train people and finance people to kill Americans.
Wow – your American exceptionalism is REALLY showing tonight, or should I say this morning?
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure you’d have gotten the same result if French troops had gone running into the compound.
The US military doesn’t send multiple helicopters full of soldiers in to execute somebody in am age of drones. The first priority was to capture bin Laden alive. They failed. There was a firefight. Not everyone got killed, just those fired or were in the way.
In most places when someone engages in a firefight when due process might be available, it is not called murder. Or assassination. And it was in the US interest to put Osama bin Laden on trial in the US as a demonstration of US due process.
Yes, Barack Obama, has gained a lot of domestic political capital. Let’s now see what he does with that political capital. He is now in a domestic political position to claim victory and leave Afghanistan, which would stabilize the situation there. He is in a domestic political position to lean harder on Saleh to resign. Let’s see if there is some movement there. He is in a domestic political position to absolutely be able to withdraw the remaining troops from Iraq on schedule or ahead of schedule. He might even be in a domestic political position to do something real about the detainees in Guantanamo, although that’s one is politically a little dicey.
Let’s wait and see what President Obama does with US foreign policy as a result of this event. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism will likely close the opportunities that he has for changing US policy. Politically in the US, not that it matters, Hamas has not helped itself with the US public by jumping to declare bin Laden a religious warrior and hero. That does nothing to loosen the grip of the Israeli government on the US domestic politics surrounding Palestine.
You can’t asked for nuanced understanding of what is going on in North Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan-Pakistan and then respond to what is going on domestically in the US as if Americans are all cartoon figures and all American Presidents think alike.
Everywhere, everywhere, domestic politics drives foreign policy. In dictatorships it is easier to describe the foreign policy; domestic public political opposition can be met with repression. In oligarchies it is more complex. In democracies more complex still.
The combination of the Arab Awakening and now the death of bin Laden has provided an opportunity to change American attitudes to the muslim countries. Let us wait and see if Barack Obama can lead that change in attitude.
Bullshit.
You are smarter than that. Or at least you should be. No glory in the use of drones. No drama. Just Skynet/Terminator-like efficiency. We’re in an election here, Tarheel! This operation was simply a really big Photo Op.
With guns.
Your naivete is touching.
What Barack Obama will do with US foreign policy is that he will continue to try to keep oil prices down far enough so that the totally unbalanced U.S. economy will be able to survive without the interference of urban food and fuel riots. Just as has been the case for about 40 years in the Middle East.
Job One?
Dassit, podna.
Bet on it.
That’s why he was hired.
Just doing his job.
A knee that repeatedly jerks due to blows from a blunt object is not “knee-jerk”, Tarheel, it is a natural reflex.
Ditto the anti-Americanism that is and has been rampant throughout most of the third world since the end of WW II. I can remember the “Yankee Go Home” signs in South America when Nelson Rockefeller went there for a so-called goodwill visit in the ’50s. The shock!!! “What’s wrong with those people!!!??? We’re the good guys!!!
Here is what’s wrong. And it ain’t right yet. Not by a long shot.
And the beat goes on.
Lemme ask you that classic politician’s question.
“Are we better off now than we were before?”
Are we?
Better off for all of the murder and theft in which the United States has engaged since we became the big stick in the neighborhood?
If we had instead concentrated all of that energy and money into putting our own house in order…ending racial discrimination in the public educational system (the worst kind of all, and barely touched by the so-called “civil rights revolution”), stopping drugs as they came over the borders, controlling the depredations of the financial sector, policing the massive media system that is absolutely, positively built on keeping the population in a state of hypnomedia-induced consumerist sleep…would we now be in debt nearly to the breaking point? Would we be ruled by a corporate culture that is predicated upon nothing more than showing a quarterly profit in order to survive through the next quarter?
I do not think so.
But…that is the case now.
Madoff?
Small change.
The entire United States of America is now a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
And you are celebrating just another collateral damage death in the pursuit of maintaining that system.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
Booman Tribune ~ A Very Happy Night
and most importantly, got off oil as prime daily fix, and sponsored renewables in an apollo-mission type initiative…
to shut down coal and nukes, we’d need a national emergency attitude.
Subsequent reporting, seemingly based on military or Administration sources, suggests that the team of Seals was sent rather than a missile because it was important to be able to prove that Osama binLaden was dead.
As for “when someone engages in a firefight when due process might be available”, it is only due process from an American point of view, when you are the self-appointed world police. Due process in Pakistan is handled by Pakistani authorities.
Most of the world probably sympathises with the outcome, but that doesn’t change the fact that the US illegally invaded another country and tried to kidnap someone.
And by the way, how do you connect “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq with bin Laden? They are two entirely separate issues.
It was eight years ago to the day when Bush gave his “mission accomplished” speech.
.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."A very happy night: NOT
I`m watching all the flags waving at ground zero, many of them made in China from what I hear & the cheering of people at Osama`s death.
This is a very disgusting display in my eyes.
The US has killed many more people than Osama could ever kill when the previous administration decided to go kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqi humans.
It`s sickening to me to see people cheering the death of a human.
No matter what he did, he was simply another person like Saddam that the US used till they were of no more import.
Anyone cheering the death of a former “friend” should be ashamed.
A “happy night” would be when Bush is hunted down.
I`m very disappointed in what I`m seeing on the progressive blogs tonight.
Actually, I`m fucking really upset.
I have no love for Osama, Timmy McVeigh, Jim Jones nor Stalin, but the online rejoicing is just sickening.
Count me out.
Read my post.
A “Very Happy Night” is it, Booman? Get real.
This is truly disgusting.
If went sent some U.S. Navy Seals into the Bush and Cheney residences at the same time? Arrested them for treason and multiple war crimes? Shot ’em if they resisted?
Now that might even things out a little.
Otherwise?
This is sheer bullshit.
Read my post for more.
AG
Call me unsurprised at your reaction, Art.
And I by yours.
Surprised?
Naaaahhh.
Just disgusted.
AG
I’m not in favor of the death penalty, but I accept it is justice done, and I think that’s probably better than no justice at all.
The thing I’m happy about is this: I think suddenly people will be wondering what the hell we’re doing in Afghanistan. Maybe people will now be more focused on getting us out of there.
There could be some tragic retaliations coming up, seems to me. But on the other hand, Al Jazeera described the mood on Al Qaeda sympathetic online boards as one of just shock so far.
A note from Meteor Blades on Daily Kos says that Bin Laden’s body will be handled in traditional Islamic fashion. I’m glad of that.
Interesting use of the word justice. There was never any attempt to regard the 9/11 attrocity as a crime and use mechanisms in place around the world to bring Osama and others to justice. A war on terror was instead declared and that meant such concepts as justice were immediately off the table and concepts such as victory were on it. War is never about justice.
Strangely, I feel no joy, nor any other emotion.
In the circumstances I can understand the wave of celebration sweeping the US. BooMan I also understand you being part of this. However it is most definitely American exceptionalism to claim that the extra-judicial killing of Osama bin Laden was delivery of justice.
It appears that Pakistani authorities were not informed about the action until it had taken place. Armed US forces invaded an ostensibly friendly sovereign nation and attempted to abduct one or more people, no doubt contrary to Pakistani law. Those people apparently resisted and ended up dead.
Only one country in the world does this sort of thing and gets away with it. You do it because you can, not because it is right. This was all about vengeance and US domestic politics, not justice.
.
France, Israel, Iran, England , Dutch and in principle all colonial powers or totalitarian regimes.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Precisely.
Thank you.
AG
P.S. I might add that the U.S. “gets away” with things like this not just because of its military might but also because of its hypnomedia-enforced stranglehold on almost its entire population.
Including the leftiness clones that inhabit the blogosphere.
The whole country is addicted to “news opera.”
That’s soap opera only using real people. No wonder they cancelled “All My Children” and “One Life to Life.” Who needs ’em? We’ve got the news now. So much better produced!!!
I came here first, thinking I’d enjoy your thoughts on this more-so than the rest of my blog-roll. Lol, so much for that. I’m not happy; I’m not sad, either. I don’t know what I feel, I just know that the chantings of “U-S-A” make me feel sick to the bone.
I share PZ Myers’ thoughts, in full:
It is not US policy to gloat. However, it is the current US culture to consider foreign affairs a sport with the US one of the teams. That spirit motivated the jubilation. Along with the sense (accurate or not) that the “Global War on Terror” is over and “we won”.
This event just might allow American culture to change. It might just be possible to undo fear-driven politics.
I, for one, am happy that Bin Laden is dead. But I am not sure any of us will live long enough to see the unwinding of fear driven politics. If anything, the cultural root that drives that naively arrogant “U-S-A” chant we heard in the streets last night is growing stronger by the day. I think this event might just contribute to its further entrenchment in our society.
Rough crowd.
I thought I made it clear that I was setting aside wider context for the moment so that we could just have some time to enjoy this accomplishment.
I’m not big on raining on parades.
Once we find out what happened and how it all went down, then we can think about what it means.
Bet on it.
The rougher the better.
It’s a rough life, Booman. And I personally feel free…no, make that I personally feel required…to rain on any parade that is predicated upon murderous bullshit.
You actually think that “we” will find out a goddamned thing about this incident beyond whatever self-serving hype will come out of the ass of the PermaGov machine?
Plus…how what happened?
Bin Laden’s death?
Someone once asked Louis Armstrong what happened to his ever-present valet. Louis answered “Oh. Ain’t you heard? He died.” The guy answered “That’s a shame. What was wrong with him?” and Pops replied “Man…when you’re dead, everything’s wrong with you!!!”
You want to know the gory details?
A sign of severe media addiction. They’ll spin a soap opera out of thin air and a few info bubbles, and you’ll bite.
Sad.
Again…how what happened?
How bin Laden avoided capture for 10 years?
Betcha you won’t hear that story anytime soon.
How the 9/11 plotters managed to get away with their act while under surveillance by numerous American security systems?
Hmmmm…you’ll learn how that happened as soon as we know how JFK was killed.
Don’t hold your breath.
And…wake the fuck up.
Jesus!
What fools these mortals be!
AG
you are lucky to have such principled commenters.
the real rough crowd was outside the white house…