One More Such Victory Will Undo Us

If the death of Osama bin Laden is a victory it is, at best, a pyrrhic victory.

On the one hand, we have achieved a goal: to hunt down and kill or capture (why in that order?)  those responsible for the planning and leading of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  

Never mind that it took ten years, cost how many billions of dollars, and led to the death and injury of hundreds of thousands of men and women.  And bin Laden’s leadership has surely already been replaced within al-Qaeda.  

It might be a victory as an act of war – the death of an enemy – but it is a failure to achieve justice.  Shot in the dark by a team of assassins without witness and without jury, and without accurate accounts of his death, Osama bin Laden’s death seems more like revenge than justice.  Justice is done in light and in the open for all to see.  Revenge is taken in the secret shadow and dark.

It might be a victory in that we have eliminated an evil man – but his death also represents our failure to make this world a place where peace reigns, because we (Americans) are, in some measure, responsible for what he became.  I fully acknowledge, of course, that he was responsible for his own choices and his own life, but the U.S. Government trained and funded him and his network for years.  His death now, is emblematic of our failure to be “peace-makers.”

Victories like this one will destroy us.