Chronicle of a Death Foretold

As sheerah noted, the Diabolical Mastermind of 9/11 sleeps with the fishes.I've been turning this over in my mind, and just wanted to jot down my thoughts in no particular order.

1. The eternal 14-year-old who lives in the top bunk inside my head is doing a manic little happy dance shouting "Ha! Last taps! Gotcha last, motherfucker! (I was a rude boy even at fourteen) How do you like that, bitch! Who's your daddy now, asshole?"

2. The Army sergeant down the hall hears the commotion but just shrugs, albeit with a certain grim satisfaction. While it's satisfying that the author of the current troubles bides safe in a ditch, after ten years and a mountain of corpses he seems...well, kind of an asterisk. Just another fucking body. Another day at the office. Oh, well.

3. The guy who thinks about geopolitics and strategy (a pipe-smokingish sort of pseudo-intellectual who occupies the flat below the other two and bangs irritably on the ceiling when they get loud up there) enjoys a certain moment of pleasure in the pure professionalism of the USN takedown team. In a decade of highly publicized gaffes and blunders this op went off like water off a cat's ass. Nice work, SEALS.

And he feels like wagging his professorial finger in the face of the neo-cons and the liberal interventionsts; THIS is how you do it, dumbfucks. John Paul Vann told you decades ago but you didn't want to listen. No drone strikes, no invasions, no smart bombs. A double-tap to the skull.

But then he thinks (because he's just that sort of a dick) that in a REALLY slick op ol' Osama would have been lured into the bed of a Karachi he-whore and found, shall we say, not leaving his boy's behind? The only long-term way to discredit a guru's teachings is to discredit the Guru. The Baghwan Rajneesh looks like an idiot today because he lived long enough to outlive his legend. J. Edgar Hoover isn't a laughingstock because he broke all kinds of domestic laws but because he's got a rep for prancing around in a dress.

This way the mook has what he wanted; martyrdom, with the entry wounds in the front, dying in the midst of the chaos he wanted to foment by a U.S. bullet. Seventy-virgins, here I come, baby!Instead of in bed shouting "drill, baby, drill!" with just one Pakistani man-whore.

And the other thought that occurs to him is that the location of the final day of OBL's life says something, and not anything particularly positive, about the so-called "Global War on Terror". Abbotabad is a Pakistani army cantonment, very close to the capital. It is impossible to believe that either the Army, or ISI, or both (and by inference the military players in Pakistani politics) didn't know the SOB was there. This kind of reinforces the theme that there really isn't much of a "global" war here, especially in the hunting grounds of SW Asia, but rather a JUSWOSKT: a "just-U.S.-war-on-some-kinds-of-terrorism".

And his other-other thought is; what does it say about our national mindset that we're all "USA! USA!" about this...that nobody (yet, at least) has publicly regretted that the fucker wasn't snatched to stand up in front of the ICC or a U.S. court with the rest of the dog-rapers? That by giving him a fully metal-jacketed 5.56 all-area pass to Hell means that the radio is playing his song, not ours; that this is a "war", that he was a "soldier" instead of a skeevy little bitch who struck from behind and never faced a U.S. troop in anger. Well, now he has and, yeah, this ain't the Special Olympics and there's no second prize. But, still...

4. The wanna-be comedian living in the cardboard box in the alley out back (hey, comedy doesn't pay all that well for most of its practitioners...) wishes he'd thought of jim's "long-form-death-certificate" joke; it definitely wins the prize for best comment. Because you KNOW that this will show up on FOX as "Bush's long-time goal finally attained!". Because among the Limbaugh/Beck Right the Kenyan Usurper will never get credit for his Great Commander-in-Chiefyness. Because...well, he's just a foreign Negro.So adios, Osama. I wish I thought your death would be the game-changer we thought it'd be when we were trying to slot you ten years ago. But right now, you just seem like one more dead guy reaped from a place which grows dead guys like a cash crop.

Update 5/2 p.m.: This article in the New Yorker makes a good point:

"The initial circumstantial evidence suggests that...bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. Outside the Justice Department, other sections of the United States government will probably underplay any evidence of culpability by the Pakistani state or sections of the state, such as its intelligence service, I.S.I., in sheltering bin Laden. As ever, there are many other fish to fry in Islamabad and at the Army headquarters, in nearby Rawalpindi: an exit strategy from Afghanistan, which requires the greatest possible degree of coöperation from Pakistan that can be attained at a reasonable price; nuclear stability; and so on."

Which sums up pretty concisely why U.S. policy in the Middle East is so tortuous. The friends of our enemies are our "friends"...or, at least, people and places we need for other, often more compelling reasons.

The Middle East has been a cockpit - and a snakepit - since the days when Ramses marched up out of the Nile Valley to Kadesh. The inhabitants cannot change their skies, but for outsiders like the U.S., it would seem that the way to win the Game of Thrones in this place is not to play.