Bin Laden's Death Welcome and Late
May 2, 2011
My first reaction to bin Laden's death is good riddance. He was after all responsible for the death of scores of people around the world, including many more in Muslim countries, and that's the end ruthless killers deserve. There should be no equivocating about what happened yesterday. This was a brutal, deranged man with apocalyptic plans and the world should be grateful for his demise. My second, more reflective, reaction to the news, though, is: why ten years after 9/11? The most shocking part of the news is that bin Laden was hiding in the middle of Pakistan in a one-million-dollar mansion surrounded by houses of Pakistani military officials. This bears the question: was Obama just more determined to end this once and for all and his insistence has paid off? The fact that the United States had to take the most tortuous of roads (through Iraq) in order to get here is mind boggling. It is no secret that Bin Laden's terror campaign was further animated by Bush's irresponsible intervention in Iraq. I don't want to just engage in some popular Bush bashing, but the news yesterday just belabored some painful truths about the idiocy of that intervention. Had Bush's CIA made the termination of bin Laden as much a priority as Obama has by concentrating its intelligence on Afghanistan and Pakistan, things would have most certainly evolved differently. Instead we created a haven for Al-Qaeda by precipitating Iraq into the abyss of sectarianism.
Bin Laden should have been terminated in 2002 or 2003. His ghoulish rise to world prominence was 9/11, but the messy and dragged-on occupation of a Muslim country was a grave mistake which supplied him with yet another stage from which to preach his morbid theory of violent jihadism. As I see people rejoice over his death, I can't help but think what the world would have been like in the last 8 years has he been killed much earlier. Now that Obama has delivered on this most important promise, I hope he will withdraw all troops from Iraq and gradually from Afghanistan. The presence of U.S. troops there is a lingering disease and bin Laden's death, while it does not put an end to violence, comes at an opportune time to change foreign policy, particularly as democracy movements in the Middle East and North Africa show people's concerns and aspirations could not be farther from Al-Qaeda's.
Bin Laden should have been terminated in 2002 or 2003. His ghoulish rise to world prominence was 9/11, but the messy and dragged-on occupation of a Muslim country was a grave mistake which supplied him with yet another stage from which to preach his morbid theory of violent jihadism. As I see people rejoice over his death, I can't help but think what the world would have been like in the last 8 years has he been killed much earlier. Now that Obama has delivered on this most important promise, I hope he will withdraw all troops from Iraq and gradually from Afghanistan. The presence of U.S. troops there is a lingering disease and bin Laden's death, while it does not put an end to violence, comes at an opportune time to change foreign policy, particularly as democracy movements in the Middle East and North Africa show people's concerns and aspirations could not be farther from Al-Qaeda's.
Posted by Nabil Echchaibi.
I was born and raised in Morocco. My research focuses on the intersections between Islam, Arab popular culture and the media. I'm currently an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
