Am I sad Osama bin Laden is dead. No. Am I celebrating? Yes, but not his death. I celebrate our government finally making good on a promise. It was 11 years in coming and included making war on a country for completely unrelated and puzzling reasons, but finally they made good. It seems a lot of people forgot about that promise. They aren’t celebrating. It doesn’t bring anybody back they say. Why would that ever be part of the deal? Have we become so impractical, so mindless and lacking cognitive activity some believe this is even in the realm of possibility?
Hitler’s death brought no one back. It did, however, bring some margin of peace for some part of the world. No one of rational thought mourned his passing and was glad of it. Not because his death brought them some personal relief, but because it brought relief to a good portion of the world. I am glad for the same reason.
While some credit of this feat is deserved by the military, let’s face it. The commander-in-chief held all the responsibility. If the effort had been a massive failure, it wouldn’t have been the military taking the hit for it. Doesn’t anyone remember Jimmy Carter? Not only his political life, but his place in history is forever marred by the incident. The military followed Bush into a disastrous war that he proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” far too early over. He didn’t get nearly enough heat for that fiasco. Yet many Americans backed him and his wrong decision. Was I glad Saddam was found and killed? No. He did nothing to this country and the effort was misdirected. He was a horrible dictator, like many, many still existing in the world, but didn’t wield nearly the long arm that bin Laden did. Now we have a POTUS who carefully, thoughtfully and with guts made a decision that resulted in a rousing success and Republicans don’t want to credit him.
This morning on NPR was a discussion about what Pakistan knew and didn’t know. The current administration is thinking about what to do about our funding them. In an agrarian area, set off from any other neighborhood is a large complex surrounded by 18 foot walls topped with razor wire. There is no visible sign of a power supply, yet lights are seen. It is guarded night and day and no one has interaction with anyone in the area. And some nitwit Republican says he understands how the security forces in Pakistan might have missed this. I guarantee you, I put up an 18 foot wall with razor wire and my neighbor Frank will get the government on me. And when pressed about the length of time it took to get this guy, his response was, “It’s hard to find an individual.” He pointed to the 10 most wanted list.
Okay, if they were looking for me or you, yeah, it might take a while, but not long. Skip a tax payment, car payment, house payment….something meaningful to someone and they’ll find you. Dogs in hand, they’ll find you. Especially if you mess with the IRS. But he wasn’t you or me. He was freaking responsible for an attack on US soil and murdering over 3,000 people and then some! Where the hell were we looking? He wasn’t living in some cave as we were led to believe, but in a compound! Here’s another point. We don’t have an entire military to hunt down the 10 most wanted. We can’t afford it, like everything else that might benefit us. CSI is a TV show. That’s the only police department that could afford the Jetson technology, one that’s part of TV. I guarantee you, put the entire military to the task of finding the 10 most wanted and they’ll get found, all 10 individuals! Please, jackass, if the Bush administration were interested in finding the guy, they’d have found him.
My hope is, now that the mission is indeed accomplished, we pull up stakes and come home. My belief is that the hundreds of thousands of souls persecuted by this dead madman are resting much better, and I like to think at the moment he left this life, they waited for him in the next. They aren’t virgins, and they’re pissed.
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