Kozlowski: Bin Laden’s death raises more questions than it answers

There is always something deeply satisfying about being able to accomplish the impossible. One… There is always something deeply satisfying about being able to accomplish the impossible. One task that long fell under such a category was the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden, which was accomplished last week after 10 years of effort. But although his death is very good news for the United States, and although I am as glad as the next person that he’s dead, there are a few things that might be lost in the revelry that shouldn’t be.

Again, bin Laden’s death is a good thing. The man plotted and executed acts of murder against men, women and children, killing Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. However, the celebration of his death is disquieting. The sight of Americans dancing in the streets waving flags and chanting slogans is too reminiscent of countless scenes we’ve witnessed in the Middle East where the death of Americans was often celebrated with equal glee. This is not to imply a moral equivalence between the glee of those who cheered Sept. 11 and those who cheered the demise of its architect. This is not to blame Americans for being happy. However, it’s easy for our enemies to draw a moral equivalence between us and them with images like that.

Even without consideration for the propaganda aspects, public celebration of bin Laden’s death just doesn’t seem appropriate. Many people have struggled, died and done nasty things while we slept quietly in our beds in order to give us this triumph, and thus it doesn’t seem right to celebrate as one would celebrate victory in a football game.

Now is also not the time to become complacent about terrorism, tempting as it would be to do so. There are organizations other than al-Qaida no less fanatical in their dedication to the destruction of the United States, Israel, Europe and moderate Islam, and these organizations are wholly unaffected by the death of bin Laden.

Al-Qaida itself is decentralized and has franchises in Yemen, Egypt and elsewhere. These franchises have become used to having al-Qaida’s senior leadership not really in contact with them, meaning that these subgroups are used to thinking and acting independently. Accordingly, killing the man at the top might not be as destructive as we would hope: a corporation wouldn’t fold if its CEO were to die. Although dispatching bin Laden hinders al-Qaida’s operations and although the intelligence gained from the raid in Pakistan helps cripple the group further, it is a mistake to think al-Qaida is finished.

There are a few other aspects of this operation that aren’t really being emphasized because it would be embarrassing for the Obama administration to talk about them. First and foremost among these is where the intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts came from. On “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” last week, CIA director Leon Panetta admitted that some of the intelligence came from “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which had been widely vilified by many liberals as both illegal and ineffective. Now if those techniques were used, why aren’t liberals screaming about how the killing of bin Laden itself was tainted and illegal, and that President Barack Obama is a hypocrite? And if some of that intelligence came from enhanced interrogation, doesn’t that shift the debate over its use, at least somewhat?

The operation that took bin Laden is also attributable to the policies of George W. Bush. The CIA and FBI intelligence apparatus that was able to find out where bin Laden was hiding was not built in a day, but rather over a period of years, with some of it coming during the Bush administration. The Joint Special Operations Command, which oversaw SEAL Team Six, the team that carried out the operation, was reviled as — in the words of New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh — an “Executive Assassination Ring” during the Bush years. And is it not astonishing that in the War on Terror, Obama is continuing the Bush-era policies, so much so that the Left is complaining about it? Does the killing of bin Laden not suggest that perhaps Bush or the people surrounding him weren’t the bunch of apes they were said to be? Or at the very least that some Bush-era policies work?

So while it is certainly good news that bin Laden has finally faced the ultimate justice, it is a bit ghoulish to celebrate the news in the streets, not to mention premature to assume that this means an end to the war on terrorism. It is also important to look beyond the simple fact that bin Laden is dead and note that it was partially because of the highly controversial policies of the Bush era, continued by the current administration, that such a feat could be accomplished.

Write kozthought@gmail.com.