That was the way George W. Bush described the official U.S. view of Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the terrorist attacks that sent airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in southwestern Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, taking more than three thousand lives on American soil.
More than seven years later, the Bush Administration drew to a close with that warrant unfulfilled. But last evening there was good news: a special forces operation, carefully planned on the basis of accurate intelligence, ended in a firefight in which bin Laden was killed in Pakistan.
"Ten years after his attack on the world's most powerful nation, Osama bin Laden remains at large."
We will not read that sentence in The New York Times or The Washington Post on September 11, 2011.
"The world is a better place ... safer ... because of the death of Osama bin Laden." So intoned President Obama, with an air of confidence and certainty.
But just what effect will this apparently momentous event have on the future of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist actions targeting the United States in particular and the Judaeo-Christian West in general? As with so many other world events, including some very notable ones of the last decade, there are those prepared to make immediate pronouncements in answer to that question. Others, among whom I include myself, prefer the longer view which, while far less certain, recognizes that accurate predictions are quite difficult when so many contributing factors are unknown. Recent struggles toward democracy in the Arab Middle East are only the most obvious of these.
Intense hostility on the part of some in Islam against the West goes back at least as far as The Crusades. It intensified in the twentieth century with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the creation of Israel as an independent Jewish state in 1948. High-profile acts of terrorism hardly began with Osama bin Laden's vision. The Palestinian Black September organization's attack on the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972 was for me the most memorable.
It may be that Islam is truly a religion of peace and that it is only a tiny minority of Muslims who believe they are fulfilling the will of Allah by killing as many infidels as possible. And it may be that the death of Osama bin Laden will have a dramatic and long-lasting effect on the scope and the reach of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism around the globe. But I am a student of history, and I believe it is a fool's errand to try to predict how this aspect of the twenty-first century will unfold.
Well said on all points. I was shocked when I saw the news the other night. It was almost surreal. I am most glad that this monster has been eliminated, and I hope that we are safer for it. However, I have wondered if someone will try to take his place, or if this will truly be a turning point. Time will tell on that because there are indeed so many other factors that we cannot control nor predict.
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