No More Bin Laden

[kandrathe]

I foresee hundreds of conspiracy theory's coming up saying he isn't really dead......so why didn't they just keep the body?

Think it through psychologically. The best case scenario would have been for OBL to recapitulate, and denounce his own violence. The next best solution was to capture him, and defeat his ideology in the court of public opinion. Barring that, the US strategy needed to be the Pyrrhic victory of merely defeating him as demonstration that the US is not impotent (although a 13 year man hunt is pretty darn impotent). I'm sure they kept DNA evidence, but even so, most won't believe what they don't want to believe.

For those that wanted him dead, he's dead. For those who want him to be alive, he'll be alive -- like Elvis. Living his retirement in some hidden compound in Pakistan. I'm sure we'll be peppered with occasional OBL sightings. If they had wanted to perpetuate the hatred, and enrage the panoply of Islamo-facists, then they'd have broadcast a video of US soldiers stuffing him into the belly of a pig, and allowed his corpse to rot inside it for a month or so.

Realistically, OBL doesn't matter, and he hasn't mattered for about a decade. He's the guy we pinned the blame on for masterminding 911, and so for his part, some people in this world have called for justice. But, for these kinds of massive atrocities, justice can never be served, and never served quickly enough. Once we lost him at Tora Bora, we should have backed off, and shut down our operations in Afghanistan turning it over to whomever wanted to rule that bedraggled opium den. But, in the play book of stupid moves, unfortunately, the US has engaged in every single one both internationally, and domestically.

Since 911, and heck, going back to the Carter administration, all we've done is to make the US and the world a more dangerous place. Some of it was inevitable with the end of the Cold War, which kept many nations paralyzed in a WWII state of totalitarianism. But, once the grip a tyranny loosened, people were free to express their old rivalries and former hatreds emerged. Our world has taken a bad turn, and I'm a bit afraid of where the next decade is going. If our objectives are peace, prosperity and harmony in the world, then we're going about it in a pretty crazy manner. We are sacrificing freedom for merely the perception of security, whereas we end up with neither freedom, or security. And, I mean that financially, socially, and physically.

[Libertarian Rant]As opposed to... my position, which is the end of our military adventurism around the globe. But, rather to rededicate the US to its roots of personal freedom, making the US the best example of how a free society can be prosperous, and thrive peacefully. That doesn't mean we need to get into bed with dictators and despots, but it does mean we would engage our efforts and treasure into those things that are beneficial to everyone's short and long term interests. Our current leaders are not leaders, but propagandists, and have mostly usurped mass communications to ensure their grip on power, and temporarily enrich their supporters, to the detriment of everyone's future.[/Libertarian Rant]

Here are some of the relevant questions I ponder... How many lives, and dollars have been sacrificed chasing down this one guy? In the bigger picture, what does OBL's "assassination" mean to creating a more peaceful Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Sudan, Nigeria, etc., etc., etc? Was the UN ever intended to be a force involved in taking out it's own member states? Obama, and Bush before him, has stated that the the US is not at war with Islam, but is Islam at war with the West? What happens when the US runs out of credit with Asia, and the propping up of psuedo-Western regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan collapse?

For me, the bottom line is that the US cannot afford to continue its adventuresome interventions in everybody's squabbles. I believe NATO and the UN's purpose have been corrupted into mechanism's for projecting force, which is antithetical to most everything we believe ethical in the treatment of nations. This corruption is possible because there is little opposition to this "New World Order", where a majority of the worlds economies have aligned to engage in an orgy of consumption. For smaller, non-aligned nations, this NWO represents a form of capitalist driven police state, where profiteers wield the worlds armies organized at the UN to enforce their vision of what is "right". This exposes profoundly challenges by the most outspoken enemies of the NWO, like Qaddafi, Ahmadinejad, and Chavez, but we are increasingly seeing political and economic "pressure" being wielded against the little peaceful and non-aligned nations. But, as Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." And, in nation building, we continue to attempt to plant trees, where cactus are meant to grow, and then wonder why it's hard to keep them alive.