What is interesting, however, is the reaction of the American people to the event. Using an informal survey method that I call, "Reading people's Facebook statuses," I notice that the sentiment ranges from "Ding dong the motherfucker's dead," to "So many people celebrating violent death...kinda make you think."
Now, I'm a bloodthirsty individual who would like to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women. I am a United States Marine, and my job is ultimately to bring so much hate and discontent into the lives of the enemies of America that they take peace into their heart forever, so that they never have to see another Marine. I'm certainly not a pacifist.
I find myself, however, more in the "Why exactly are we celebrating?" camp. Realistically, Osama's death meant the removal of the largely irrelevant figurehead of an organization that seems to have found itself on the wrong side of history. Sentimentally, we killed public enemy number one and have revenged ourselves against the enemy of America. I get it.
But jingoism helps no one, and one dead man does not change the course of history. Osama bin Laden would have just been the crazy religious brother of the bin Laden family without followers, just like Hitler would have been a crazy anti-semitic failed artist and Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been a humanist and a pastor without their followers. Just like Gandhi would have been a lawyer without his. Just like Hosni Mubarak became just an octogenarian without his popular base.
My point here is that the efficacy of an individual or an organization is dependent upon the mass support it garners. Many books have been written about how inexplicable it is that Hitler's genocidal fanaticism was so popular, Gandhi and MLK garnered support by advocating collective action to pursue the well-being of disenfranchised masses, and Mubarak was overthrown because the Egyptians found economic stagnation and repression intolerable.
I won't overreach and pretend that I can definitively explain al Qaeda's popularity. If I had to venture an explanation for Islamic militarism, I would say that it's the product of traditional cultures being invaded by Western secularism, disenfranchised or repressed majorities, long-standing ethnic tensions, chronic under-education, with the existence of Israel and its tendency towards misbehavior throwing fuel on the fire. I once read an article (which I have no hope of finding again) in which it was argued that European bigotry towards its Muslim population exacerbated the hatred of America, partly because Muslims absorbed European Anti-Americanism and partly because America was for them the epitome of the Western culture that was discriminating against them (never mind that something like a ban on veils would be immediately ruled as unconstitutional).
In any case, the root cause of violent Islamic extremism is not something that can be shot, bombed, demolished, or killed. Ultimately, Osama bin Laden is just a dead Arab.
Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means, and it would serve us well to remember that violence is a limited solution and ultimately a weak tool with which to achieve our aims. Thus, Clausewitz describes warfare as the exception to the normal tools of statesmanship. As entertaining and immediately gratifying as gunfire, explosions, and death may be (especially if you're not personally involved in the gunfire, explosions, and death. I'm talking to you, 99% of America), it is an oversimple means and ill-suited for something as complicated and worthwhile as the development of civilization and the betterment of humankind.
Ultimately, it is roads, schools, commerce, elections, and prosperity that are hallmarks of civilization, not gunshots and death. We should probably put a little more effort into the former, and a little less effort into the latter.
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