Who Cares if Osama had a Gun?

I will miss Osama Bin Laden. Probably I should not put it quite that way, but he gave us a comforting sense of united hostility that was taken from us by the end of the cold war. He rescued us from a vague and purposeless moral ambiguity relieved only by the pursuit of wealth. Regardless of what we owe to Osama for the unity of resolute righteousness, however, dancing on the corpse of the enemy is a time-honored tradition and probably one of the more restrained forms of celebrating victory at the expense of the loser. Rejoice, the evil Other has been defeated. Make the most of it.

And, indeed, Osama Bin Laden was evil in his way. He was a violent extremist. Apparently he engineered the most devastating sneak attack on American “interests” in the history of sneak attacks on American interests, ending thousands of inoffensive lives in an ideological bid to wound a powerful opponent, not to mention bringing it home to the national core and seriously impacting cherished illusions about the irresistible effects of our dazzling culture. Before 9/11, nobody who spent significant time in the continental U.S. could conceivably fail to recognize the superior aspects of our way of life. After 9/11, we have to consider the realistic possibility of more cynical resistance.

But what was fair about 9/11? Unrestrained movement has been one of the signal features of freedom as we know it. Turning commercial aircraft into weapons exploited, not just the illusions of our invincible influence, but the generous accessibility of our transportation system. Regardless of age, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, or marital status, anybody can (could) get on a jet in America and fly wherever the hell they so desired without obtrusive interference and authoritative scrutiny. There was nothing special about getting on airliners in America, and hardly anything special about taking them over, but the 9/11 hijackers failed to play by the rules. The rules said you don’t gratuitously destroy the aircraft in a bid to cause as much destruction as possible. The rules said you gave authorities a fair chance to intervene, and that was the last straw with Osama Bin Laden. He didn’t play by the rules.

The religious aspects of the conflict are, as religious aspects always are, unfortunate and unnecessary, but predictable as the organizational trajectory of resistance. Where religion appeals to the disenfranchised as an ideological substitute in the mode of Marx, Althusser, and Nietszche, it attracts resistance looking for a coherent community. The failure of the state to adequately manipulate religion as potential resistance has to do with the approach/avoidance conflict of minimizing discomfort over inequitable distribution of resources by allowing the illusion of religious tolerance or even solidarity. The poor in Saudi Arabia, denied more than nominal participation in the great wealth of the aristocratic rulers, were encouraged to accept religion as a substitute for wealth and even nominal identification with the ruling class. We are all one in Mohammed. Despite the disparities in wealth, rich and poor were united in Islam.

Whether Bin Laden, despite his own wealthy origins, really appreciated the inherent hypocrisies of this unequal distribution, or really only leveraged social justice as resistance to foreign intervention in his own aristocratic projects is also a fair question, but Bin Laden also recognized that both the practical and symbolic sources of unequal distribution are rooted in the effects of economic capitalism. America is not the exclusive representative of economic disparities by any means, but it is the most blatant. In our prodigious propaganda of opportunism, we inevitably emphasize, not the potential for reconciliation, but the potential for differentiation. America is the land of opportunity. By hard work and lack of principles, anyone can be separated from their humble origins to achieve financial well-being. With the right friends between us and the dirty work of accumulating money, sometimes even a fair representation of principles survives, so that we at least have an idea of what it looks like to be honest, generous, and fair, or what it might look like in the right circumstances.

Bin Laden, however, was impatient with the rhetorical and practical demands of pretense and looked for a way to get directly at the core. So, quite appropriately he got on a jet and smashed it into the literal, structural home of the free, brave, and economically opportunistic, a gesture lost on nobody, killing three thousand people who were doing nothing more aggressive and predatory than what the rest of us do every day. And it is, therefore, just as righteously appropriate and necessary that he should die a violent death in the hands of his opponents, just as righteously appropriate as any tragedy of Shakespeare or the Greeks.

Once again, however, Bin Laden, has not totally played by the rules. What exactly went down on the third floor of the now famous urban fortress in Pakistan, like all defining occasions in history, shows no indication of a dramatic conciliation or even consesus. Bin Laden resisted. Bin Laden did not resist. Bin Laden participated in the firefight. Bin Laden had no weapon. Bin Laden used a woman as a shield. A woman threw herself between Bin Laden and the attackers.

That he was shot twice, in the face and the chest seems to be fairly well established. Why he was shot if he was unarmed and cornered is a little more problematic. Would capture have made more sense? The Navy SEALS assigned to the difficult task couldn’t know exactly what to expect. No doubt they had orders to shoot first, and SEALS do what SEALS do. That part of it, however, will be the eternal subject of critical scrutiny and analysis like what you are reading now. The spectacle of Bin Laden's demise could only have been exceeded by the spectacle of his capture, which would have been an even greater risk for the focus of controversy and divisive resistance, but Bin Laden in his final moment knew how to cheat effectively. Nothing could have been finer for the U.S. than to take him down mano a mano with his gun in his hand and a troop of hardened fighters around him. Instead, he was executed, shot down without resistance by a merciless invader. The reality is irrelevant. That’s the scenario bequeathed to us by a savvy opponent. No matter how hard we try, our simple and somewhat impatient desire to be forthright in a situation that can be nothing other than complicated has undone us. We have produced a martyr.

And finally, aside from Bin Laden’s violent fundamentalist extremism and arguable self-interest, there are the inescapable conditions of critical social issues in the Middle East and throughout the world combined with U.S. knee-jerk reactions in Iraq and continual floundering in Afghanistan. Bin Laden killed three thousand people at the World Trade Center. The U.S. killed 75,000 civilians in Iraq. The only way to justify the disparity is to argue like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that Iraquis are somehow less valuable than day traders, a demeaning reminder that we are at best no better than those we seek to defeat. The elimination of Bin Laden, even the elimination of Al-Quaida as a relevant threat, does not eliminate or even moderate the conditions that produced them in the first place. If we cannot accept the responsibilities of economic equity and self-determination for anyone but ourselves, then some form of Osama Bin Laden will be resurrected, and in the name of American interests, in the name of truth, justice, and the American way, we will fight wars of attrition until in the end, everybody loses.