Justice delivered

     We finally killed Osama Bin Laden.  It is a dramatic story.  A cathartic moment.  A satisfying demonstration of American military and intelligence capability.  And, on the part of President Obama, balls of steel.  A lesser president, like his predecessor, would have sent a bunch of cruise missiles into the compound where the intelligence services concluded that Obama seemed likely, perhaps, to be living.  Obama had the stones to send in a bunch of Navy Seals in helicopters – a tremendous operational and political risk – to get the job done in a way that we would know, and the world would know, that Bin Laden was dead.  And they went in with the intention to just kill him and bring his body out.  Not capture him so we could spend years figuring out how and where and when to put him through some sort of trial, as if what he had done was merely criminal, instead of acts of war.  He deserved to be killed, by Americans, and knowing that it was Americans who had found him and come to kill him right in his home.  

   It’s been almost ten years since September 11, 2001, when I sat down and wrote this: 

    So this is what war is.  The United States was attacked this morning.  The World Trade Center towers have been destroyed by the impact of two hijacked airliners.  Another plane has crashed into the Pentagon.  A fourth has crashed not far from Pittsburgh.  Every airport in the country has been shut down.  The cities have been evacuated.  Including mine.  So I sit here on my back porch, trying to get some work done, listening to CNN on the radio, wondering what will happen next.

    We watched on a television in the lounge at work for a while today, before we all were sent home.  I was standing next to our managing partner, who served on a Navy ship during Vietnam.  As we looked at video of the World Trade Center towers on fire he said, “If it were a movie, you wouldn’t believe it could happen.”  We have, of course, seen this movie before, in different bits and pieces.  The Towering Inferno, combined with that film about a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl, or whatever that was.  We won’t be needing those movies anymore; not for a long time.

    People in the office, and later commentators on TV, draw the obvious parallels with Pearl Harbor.  The surprise attack.  The public’s – if not yet the government’s – immediate declaration that this is an act of war.  The early recriminations and finger-pointing about who failed to see this coming.  Pearl Harbor, of course, only – how can I say “only” – involved about three thousand killed, a number that will be far surpassed today.  If ten or twenty thousand are not dead in the rubble of the World Trade Center towers, and on the streets of Manhattan, it seems now that would be an incredible stroke of luck.  At this moment I fear the likely loss of life this day will be something this country has not seen since the worst days at the end of the Civil War. 

And then this:

   

    A hundred days have passed.  The City of New York has issued another revision of the total dead or still missing at the World Trade Center.  The latest revision has the number a bit under 3,000.

   This is incredible.  Incredible that this seems like good news, after all we have been through.  “Only” 3,000 were killed, when it seemed that thousands more must have perished that day.

   Incredible that – save for the people in the floors where the planes hit and above, where they never had a chance – nearly everyone must have gotten out.  A tribute to the buildings themselves, and of course to those four hundred firefighters who went in, many of them knowing what they were in for.

   Just a hundred days have passed.  And we have figured out that it was Osama Bin Laden and his Al Quaeda band that did this thing.  We have rallied our allies, or enough of them, gathered up our planes and bombs, gone to Afghanistan, and bombed the hell out of the Al Quaeda and the Taliban who harbored them.  The Taliban are deposed from power, the Al Quaeda forces retreated up into the mountains where they were pounded into quaking pockets of submission or death or flight into Pakistan, and Bin Laden himself – it seems – is likely dead.  All in a hundred days.

   Will this mighty message reach the conscious, rational mind of enough of these zealots to get them to leave us the hell alone?  We have sent the overwhelming right message, and in the right, deliberate, precise, methodical way:  Don’t fuck with us.  We got through, with a message like this, to Khadafi.  It can work. 

   It better work.

   

     And now here we are.  Nearly ten years later.  There has been no other attack like 9/11.   Not yet.  Bin Laden is dead.  And Khadafi?  It just so happens we are bombing his bunkers these days, and killed some of his family just last week in the process.  Not because he is attacking us – we cured him of that – but because he was killing his own people and threatening to kill many more.  

    It never ends.  But some days are better than others.