My allergies were acting up at 5 am, so I came downstairs to watch TV. Seconds later, I raced upstairs to wake up Steve to tell him that Bin Laden was killed.
Now that the kids are off at school, I am glued to the TV and twitter again.
Reax:
I am worried about my husband who works in Times Square and takes the Lincoln Tunnel to the city.
Obama just won himself another term in office. No sane Republican will run against him.
Did Pakistan know that Bin laden was hiding not in a cave, but in a mansion near Islamabad?
Does this mean that we can bring our troops home and declare victory? Can we leave the war now without losing face?
Apt. 11d 
Inadvertent liveblogging of the raid:
http://chirpstory.com/li/1287
Also, lolcat quote of the day, “Sorry it took so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate I was too busy killing Osama bin Laden.”
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My dad and I both knew this would happen. We’ve been speculating that he would pull out bin Laden’s dead body at some point during these 4 years. It does make you wonder why Bush never did it until you realize that for him, the war was never about getting bin Laden but instead about transferring large amounts of American wealth into the pockets of his oil company cronies.
Here’s my issue: we’re supposed to go to Europe next month. Gah. I had planned a Chunnel ride to Paris for a few days, too.
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Very nice work, and quite unexpected.
I really hope they didn’t really bury him at sea. People in that part of the world need to know that he is really, truly, sincerely dead.
“No sane Republican will run against him.”
Everybody thought that in 1991 about Bush I, too. Less than a year later, Clinton was in the White House.
“It does make you wonder why Bush never did it until you realize that for him, the war was never about getting bin Laden but instead about transferring large amounts of American wealth into the pockets of his oil company cronies.”
Interestingly, the clues that led to bin Laden’s death came from interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. They got the name of a trusted OBL courier four years ago (i.e. during the Bush administration), and have been hunting him down ever since.
I wonder if there was an unofficial green light from the Pakistani government.
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I remember thinking that I’d seen Bush Sr. give his re-election speech after the first gulf war in ’91, too. (’92 was the first election I’d vote in, so it made an impression.) I still think the economy will be more important. Had anyone but those most closely following politics even heard of Clinton in early ’91? I hope Obama will win re-election, but think this far from seals it, even if there isn’t any unfortunate backlash.
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And they buried the body at sea??? WTF?
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Why bury him at sea? Answer?
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Obama just won himself another term in office. No sane Republican will run against him.
Yeah. What Amy said about Bush. It’s generally a good thing when foreign policy is on the top of the agenda, because that generally means that nothing domestic is so bad that it’s sucking up the energy.
That’s definitely the sort of conventional wisdom that’s true right up until it isn’t. I remember thinking — among my numerous reasons for supporting Hillary Clinton in the primaries — was that the country was a lot less sexist than racist in their voting patterns (based on the success rates of women and minority Senate candidates). And for my years in Pennsylvania, the mantra was always that a Jewish Philadelphia Democrat could never win the governorship due to voting patterns in the rest of the state — up until Rendell did it by fairly wide margins.
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Sorry, math is hard–I botched the timing on the Gulf War chronology. The war ended in early 1991, the election was in 1992, Clinton was inaugurated in early 1993, so there were nearly two years between the end of the Gulf War and the beginning of Clinton’s presidency. The shift from Bush I’s amazing popularity during and immediately after the Gulf War wasn’t quite as dramatic as I was thinking, but it was pretty dramatic. Bush I went from a hero to a zero amazingly quickly, under the pressure of high unemployment. Also, that happened nearly 20 years ago–the political cycles run even faster these days.
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They buried him quickly at sea to be sensitive to Islamic sensibilities that require a quick burial, but I was just reading an AP story that quoting various Islamic authorities who are offended by the sea burial. So, cultural sensitivity fail. I’m not going to inflict the horribly long URL on you guys–some day I’ll do HTML, but not today.
Say what you will about the brutality of the Saddam Hussein execution, but it left no doubt that he was really dead. The US needed to kill the legend of bin Laden every bit as much as it needed to kill the man and this really isn’t going to help.
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I really don’t think this should be an occasion for making political points (even for political scientists). We saw our friends murdered before our eyes, and now we see justice done. Thank God. And congratulations to our president.
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I think American elections usually end up being about economics, and not anything else. The foreign policy exception arises when people feel that foreign policy is somehow directly affecting their well-being. So, I think you get credit for wars you’re in the midst of, but not ones that you’ve ended.
Now, I also do not believe that killing Bin Laden ends this “war” because it was never a war, as wars have been understood in the past (in spite of what Bush tried to argue with a “war” on terrorism.
There are some who will not give Obama credit for anything positive accomplished under his watch, no matter what it is, but this accomplishment will definitely help him.
But, I think the important question is whether it helps the rest of us. Will incidents of terrorism go down? Will they go down enough that we’ll be willing to give up the loss of liberties that stem from our fears of terrorism?
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“I really don’t think this should be an occasion for making political points.”
Of course. Unless you’re a Republican, which means it is perfectly fine to wrap yourself in a flag and say God Bless America and go back to comparing taxation to the Holocaust. Please, you think I don’t know the rules by now?
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So the grave won’t be a shrine… but I bet the compound could become one. I also figured the conspiracy theories would begin before 10pm PDT, which is when I heard it on the car radio heading home.
I wonder how much of my “meh” reaction is me being cynical, and how much of it is that I really, really wanted him tortured before being killed.
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“So the grave won’t be a shrine… but I bet the compound could become one.”
But much less satisfyingly so. I think it was the right thing to do to make OBL’s final resting place unfindable. His funeral would have been the social event of the decade in Pakistan–we’d find out exactly how “extreme” OBL is in the context of Pakistan if a million Pakistanis had turned out to bury him, which could very easily have happened. (Wikipedia says that two million attended Khomeini’s funeral.) In view of recent events in North Africa, that could have snowballed into an overthrow of the Pakistani government, and then we’d be looking at a radical Islamic government with nukes. So, burial at sea was not the worst available choice.
“Now, I also do not believe that killing Bin Laden ends this “war” because it was never a war, as wars have been understood in the past (in spite of what Bush tried to argue with a “war” on terrorism.”
It sure was a real war in the early days in Afghanistan, when the US was at war with the legal government of Afghanistan, which happened to be the Taliban.
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Likewise, initially the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a conventional war. It was only later on that it turned into something different that the US was not prepared to fight at the time.
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I don’t think this significantly affects the 2012 election at all, really. People with economic issues in the US haven’t really cared much about terrorism for a while, and the hardcore conservative opposition to Obama wouldn’t like him if Jesus came to Earth and personally endorsed him and he personally discovered a limitless cheap non-polluting energy source that would solve most human economic problems.
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I believe that it was Helen Chenoweth — an old Representative from Idaho who was considered very Conservative when she was first elected in the 1994 Gingrich wave — who they used to say was so divisive that she would poll “49% against Jesus and 51% against Satan.”
I think that’s becoming true of lots more candidates these days.
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I don’t think this affects the 2012 election, either. I know a lot of people are celebrating, but I don’t think that will make much of a difference if the economy isn’t significantly better in 2012. (I wonder if people who were in NY/the Pentagon on 9/11 have a different reaction to this than those who weren’t?) If this becomes an opportunity to get out of Afghanistan and dismantle the “war on terror,” then it may have an effect on politics, but I have a hard time thinking Obama’s going to dismantle the current status quo when he hasn’t made much attempt to so far.
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“I really don’t think this should be an occasion for making political points.”
Of course. Unless you’re a Republican, which means it is perfectly fine to wrap yourself in a flag and say God Bless America and go back to comparing taxation to the Holocaust. Please, you think I don’t know the rules by now?
Wendy for the win.
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Well, Wendy, the below is swiped from Instapundit:
NANCY PELOSI, 2006: KILLING OSAMA DOESN’T MATTER.
Nancy Pelosi 2011: Killing Osama is Huge!
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“…personally endorsed him and he personally discovered a limitless cheap non-polluting energy source that would solve most human economic problems.”
That would be really cool. I bet he would win then, although wouldn’t his talents be wasted inside the White House?
“If this becomes an opportunity to get out of Afghanistan and dismantle the “war on terror,” then it may have an effect on politics…”
I kind of lean that direction myself since Afghanistan seems like such an unfixable hell hole. Nearly 10 years seems like a pretty fair trial. However, you’d have to make peace with the fact that there will be a constant stream of horrible news stories out of Afghanistan afterwards, and a lot of nice people will be wringing their hands wondering, can’t we DO something (which is how we got into the Libya thing and the Somalia thing, etc.). Also, whenever the US did some sort of missile strike (and we’d have to do so with some regularity), we’ll be hearing how the strike hit a wedding party, killed a dozen kids, destroyed a school for the blind, etc. The worst case scenario would be having to do a repeat ground invasion because it turned out that we can’t keep a lid on the place from 30,000 feet. I guess the question is, what would be the difference between Afghanistan with a US presence and Afghanistan with no US presence, and does the difference justify staying there indefinitely.
Obama himself said in his Osama speech, “Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must –- and we will — remain vigilant at home and abroad.” It will be interesting to see what exactly being vigilant entails.
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Well, it seems I am outvoted: everyone wants to talk about the political implications, and a significant minority believes that this is the moment to spew vituperation at the hated Republicans. I’m so glad I am not that kind of person.
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I was just talking with a friend. We agreed that we don’t understand the impulse to dance in the streets. Many of those celebrating publicly were young. I think 9/11 changed the way young people, those in high school and younger, perceive the world. They do not seem to believe that everyone loves America.
I’m not lamenting his death. He deserved it. If nothing else, it is a good thing that the U.S. did keep hunting him through ten years and two presidencies.
On the other hand, to quote a famous Democrat, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Sane Republicans will take him on. If you’re afraid of campaigning in a time of $5 gas, raging unemployment (the real #, including those who have been unemployed long enough to no longer be counted), and decreasing civil liberties, you’re not a politician.
Osama bin Laden was an enemy. He isn’t the only enemy of the West. Pakistan?
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“I was just talking with a friend. We agreed that we don’t understand the impulse to dance in the streets.”
It’s taken so long that at this point, I don’t feel anything at all.
I think there is some value to killing OBL nearly 10 years later, just like there was in executing Saddam Hussein so many years after his enormities. There is a well-founded perception that it is much more dangerous to be the US’s friend than to be our enemy. We have a lengthy record of cutting and running and leaving our former friends to pay the price (for example, in Southeast Asia). While I think we should work on how we treat our friends, I think we’ve done pretty well recently in demonstrating that it’s very dangerous to be our enemy. I’m not wild about our Libyan adventure, but if NATO bags Gadaffi, that would be fantastic.
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I do not believe for a second that those of you who are so blase right now wouldn’t be militantly cheerful if this had happened during Bush’s presidency. You are welcome to assume that I wouldn’t be happy, though you would probably be wrong. 9/11 was very very hard on me.
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I’m cheerful now. I just don’t like to rejoice vocally (or whatever) at killing. If there was a shorter window since 9/11, it might be different.
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“I do not believe for a second that those of you who are so blase right now wouldn’t be militantly cheerful if this had happened during Bush’s presidency.”
It sort of slipped my mind, but part of the reason for a muted response is that I figured that he’d been dead for years now.
This is funny–it’s a bunch of people on Twitter asking “Who is Bin Ladin?”
http://www.joannejacobs.com/2011/05/who-is-osama-bin-laden/
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