Are you celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden, mourning his loss, or just wondering who that is?
Instant hated symbol of New Yorkers in 2001, then, by state vilification, of all Americans, accused of a single brilliant viciously conceived attack that murdered, cowardly and horribly, 3000 innocents one crisp September morning.
Bin Laden thence endured a decade as the war on terror pin-up.
On both sides.
How can I not celebrate his death?
Survivors of 9/11, the rest of the United States, most of whom never grasped the reason for this attack, will despise Bin Laden to their graves.
Yet how can I not mourn him?
Countries recipient, over the past century, of US imperialism bear little favour for this nation of sweetly naïve can-do imperialists.
Tit for tat through mists of history finds – in USA versus the world – the former as chief litigant and witting aggravator, an interloper utterly unfazed by hegemony 101: prodding natives with pointy sticks makes them fractious to the point of biting you on sight.
In the lands of Bin Laden ireful Yankee resistance is warrior kudos. But taking revenge not on the US military but on 3000 civilians, a symbolic but too cynical target, demeans their cause to murderously misconceived.
Most stunned by Operation Geronimo were Pakistani military and intelligence. Then acute discomfort foreseeing the entire planet digest with a jaw-drop that a famous terrorist hunted around the world for TEN years by its largest and most ferocious military… was slumming it at a mansion within pizza-delivery of Islamabad, a refreshing jog from the Pakistan Military Academy.
For who knows how long.
With the derring-do of Apache raiders, armed infidels invade God’s stronghold and murder his apostle. These were brave heathens, however. Unlike their leaders.
The retrospective epitome of Operation Geronimo – aside from a corn-fed moniker – was the chilling sight of assembled mission commanders imitating the art of Jack Ryan, pantomiming the most ghoulish of modern inventions: the killing room.
Remotely executing state-declared scum via satellite is one of civilization’s low points.
Publishing it as voyeuristic news violates warrior ethos.
Soldiers stifle the crushing personal shame of taking an enemy life and will not speak of it.
They have no pride in such soul-destroying deeds. Memory of that murder is placed in a mental strongbox and the key flung far from home. But the soldier’s life is forever ruined. No longer a member of his family, he is now the killer who lives among them.
Parading such an unspeakable moment in press imagery is a blunder lost on White House actors.
It showed only the sickening loss of reality afflicting the U.S. administration.
A loss that began with Hiroshima.