On the Death of bin Laden

            There was a time, early on in the war in Afghanistan, when I might have felt a sense of finality to know that he was gone. Yet, even then, the number of explosives being dropped into those caves in the caves of Tora Bora seemed ungodly. We were after a man known for his asceticism as well as his diabolical schemes; it was hard to feel virtuous about our methods of overkill. He spoke out about Western idolatry and American greed and we blasted the countryside with cluster bombs.

            They say that bin Laden learned his tactics while fighting the Soviets. They, too, had hoped to wipe out the mujahedeen from that austere landscape. Instead, the Soviet Union imploded, bankrupting itself through excessive military operations and ignoring the needs at home. Bin Laden, it seems, knew how to provoke the enemy into a violent rage, prompting it to spend beyond its means and attack beyond its reach. Like the Soviets, we threw our most precious resources into the fight, and still Osama bin Laden survived.

Soldiers died.  Money, that could have been used to fund schools and improve cities, was spent on tanks and Black Hawks and a Green Zone. Osama bin Laden did us great harm on a clear day in September almost ten years ago, but we have been harming ourselves daily ever since.

Maybe if we had known what it would take to avenge those deaths, we might have spared ourselves the anguish of two wars. As it turned out, we didn’t need the banner of war to invade another country; we just needed enough good information to bring in a cadre of Navy seals. Maybe if we had known that his end would come through extralegal means, we could have spent our days peacefully waiting for his assassination.

            But waiting peacefully for his assassination felt too much like waiting naively for another attack. Paul Wolfowitz, an Under Secretary of Defense, justified invading Iraq as a strategy to avoid attacks on the homeland. We’ll provoke the beast on Iraqi soil, he told us in the early days of 2003. Fighting Americans in Iraq will keep bin Laden from killing Americans in Manhattan and DC. Better to let the river Tigris flow with blood and body parts and keep the Hudson and Potomac clean. Besides, he explained confidently, this won’t take long. Fanatics won’t survive American might. And the Tigris ran red and the coffers of Washington and New York City hemorrhaged dollars yet the fanatic did live on.

            But that is the nature of revenge: so focused are we on the injuries we wish to inflict that we forget to notice the harm we do to ourselves. And the harm has been immense. Whether you were for the invasion of Afghanistan or against it, whether you were for the invasion of Iraq or against it, the fact of the matter is that you are less well off now than you were ten years ago; unless, of course, your fortunes are tied to the making of cluster bombs.

            But it’s not just soldiers and congressional budgets that have suffered in the last ten years, there has also been the terrible harm done to our institutions. By creating an extralegal detention center in Guantanamo Bay, we brought mayhem into our judicial system. The American public would no longer grant terrorists the dignity of a criminal trial even though military tribunals remain confused about how to treat enemy noncombatants. The rules we established last century, we told ourselves, no longer apply, forgetting that no rules and no courts mean no finality. Without a legitimate court, there is no trial. Without a trial, there is no conviction. Without conviction there is no closure. Our cry for revenge is swallowed in the throat, like the sea folding around his body at his military funeral. Our institutions, it would appear, can only handle our enemies when they are dead.

            Now that he is dead, maybe we can stop and assess our methods for exacting revenge. Maybe we can stop sending soldiers, stop buying armored vehicles, stop killing ourselves with a thousand cuts. Now that Osama bin Laden has been taken out by Special Forces, maybe we can think about the institutions we need to bring finality to our vengeance.

            For it’s not just with our enemies that we need institutions to bring finality. We also need to find some closure with each other. The war that Wolfowitz promised would be fought on foreign soil shows no sign of stopping in American politics. Congress passes a health care bill and the states vow to stop it. There is no resolution among Democrats and Republicans, just the next step in a long drawn out political suicide. The habits developed after 9/11, the persistent yearning for revenge, are destroying our capacities for self-rule. Unless we develop different habits, bin Laden’s strategy to bring down America will continue after his death.

            By focusing so much on what he did to us, we forgot to consider the harm of vengeance itself. In other words, by hating him we neglected to care for ourselves. But now that he’s gone, now that the sea has swallowed his corpse, maybe we can stop hurting ourselves. Vengeance can’t be unlearned but it can be overwhelmed.

For us to do that, however, we’ll need to feel the bitter shock of remorse. It’s a hard feeling to get used to, especially after a decade spent cultivating the habits of revenge, but a necessary one. Because after remorse comes forgiveness. “I’m sorry,” we might say to each other. “I’m sorry we keep causing each other so much pain.” Now that he’s gone, it’s time to face our most dangerous adversary: that part of ourselves that cares little for our suffering, that part of ourselves easily manipulated into death by a thousand cuts.