The Death of Osama bin Laden

I’m having trouble knowing how to feel about our finally having killed Osama bin Laden. I’m having trouble knowing how to think about it too, which is more immediately troubling, because I usually know what I think before I know how I feel.

I’ve been thinking about this day since President Bush first began to characterize the American response. Here’s a clip from CNN.U.S.

Osama bin Laden is the "prime suspect" in last Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the United States wants to capture him "dead or alive," President Bush said Monday.

Speaking with reporters after a Pentagon briefing on plans to call up reserve troops, Bush offered some of his most blunt language to date when he was asked if he wanted bin Laden dead.

I want justice," Bush said. "And there's an old poster out West I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'"

So that’s where I start. A cowboy president talking about a wanted criminal, equating his capture or his death, and calling either “justice.” That’s what President Obama called it too, in his speech last night: “justice.”

Maybe this is the place for me to say that I missed 9/11. I was at the hospital helping to prep my wife for the first of several cancer surgeries. I saw the report on the hospital TV monitors, but I didn’t care very much at the time. I had more pressing matters. As a result, I don’t feel the sense of closing of the circle of this event the way I might have otherwise.

Certainly, I don’t feel bad about bin Laden’s death. He declared war on the United States and we have been killing his followers as fast as we could find them ever since. Our assassination of bin Laden is part of the same war as his attack on the World Trade Center. Wars produce casualties.
On the other hand, successfully prosecuting a war against your enemies is not ordinarily called “justice.” Why is it not “revenge?” Certainly that is the way bin Laden thought of the 9/11 attacks; he was avenging some group—you can almost take your pick—for the acts of war against it/them by the United States.

The good thing about “justice” as an explanatory term is that it suggests a natural ending. A criminal commits a horrific act; he is apprehended, charged, convicted, and sentenced; then “justice is carried out,” whatever that means in practical terms. And then it’s over. The sheriff comes to town, challenges the bad guys, kills the bad guys, and rides off into the sunset to the accompaniment of applause from grateful townspeople. Justice was done, we say.

The bad thing about revenge is that there is no way to punctuate it. With what act does it start? Does it end while there are still potential combatants available? Is it over when the sense of honor that requires it has finally waned to levels that don’t show on the meter anymore? It is over when “what honor requires” has moved beyond tit for tat?

All of our stories begin with 9/11. Everything was fine before that and then a bad person did this awful thing and now we have done an awful thing back and now it’s over. Does that sound at all plausible? I offer the following comparison, not to equate the gravity of the two offenses, but only to point to the difficulties of punctuating events “correctly.” Everything was fine and then Pastor Terry Jones desecrated the Koran, so we retaliated by killing some people from his “group”—that would be the infidel West, I guess—and now it’s over. Does that sound at all plausible?

I appreciate President Obama’s sober approach to this event in his speech. I admire the speech itself. Having written a fair number of speeches, I admire the craftsmanship. Had I written the speech, I am sure I would have advised him to use the word “justice” just as he did.

But the fact is, “justice” is a term in a certain kind of story and this is not that kind of story.