It is truly a consolation that Osama bin Laden is dead, that his organization is, apparently, reeling, that since 9/11 America has not been hit by a major terrorist attack, that terrorism in general, though hardly defeated, is no longer the wave of the future, that a significant memorial is rising at ground zero.
All true. But all, unfortunately, the minor part of the ledger. Bin Laden is dead, but so is the pre-9/11 America. It is not just innocence that has been lost. It is infinitely more.
It is approximately 6,000 American soldiers, lost in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, in wars that likely would not have occurred without 9/11.
It is approximately 137,000 civilians killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
It is some 7.8 million refugees in those countries.
It is approximately $4 trillion that America spent on these wars, and the accompanying, extraordinary blow to the American economy.
It is the terrible relationship that has developed between the US and Pakistan the Muslim nuclear power.
It is the low standing of the US in the greater Middle East (way beyond Israel) in general, and the essential failure in Iraq, which, for all of the blood and treasure expended, is neither a viable democracy nor a reliable friend of the US.
It is the exposure of the weakness of NATO.
It is the incremental, imperceptible acceptance in this country of the creeping Big Brother state, in which each successive stage of denudation at the airport, prior to flying, is seen as not a big deal; and, similarly, in which the multiplication of government security agencies is also seen as natural.
It is, in general, the desensitization to the idea that some people need to kill other people to acquire their own legitimacy; that senseless slaughter and mass murder and suicide have entered the realm, if not of the normal, then of the expected.
It is, specifically, the incremental decrease in shock at incidents such as the Muslim American soldier who guns down other soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas; it is the observation that America is somehow fortunate because Fort Hood incidents have not occurred more often.
It is the bleak mental landscape that has overcome this country, the pessimism about the future.
It is the resort to call it what you want, torture or a little less than torture in dealing with terrorist suspects, whether ethically justified or not.
It is the failure to ask the country to sacrifice for the war on terror, a failure that began when George W. Bush articulated the morally bankrupt adjacency of answering evil by going shopping; when he began our national denial about the deep changes the enemy sought to bring about in our society, and aided in the failure to resist them through joint sacrifice.
It is about the unequal sharing of the bloodletting, of the military burden of those 6,000 deaths, which do not evenly represent all strata of American society.
It is about the doubly wrong and doubly extreme gesture of suspecting every American Muslim and of exonerating every American Muslim. Theyre all potential terrorists . . . theyre all peace loving people it is about that fallacious polarization.
It is about the legitimation of radical Islam and suicide bombing worldwide.
Shrewdly, maliciously, animated by a level of evil not seen since the Nazi period, Osama bin Laden knew exactly what he was doing. Even though he underestimated the resolve of this country to defeat him, he, though now dead, extended his tentacles deep into the space and time of America. The power of evil is easier to muster than the power of good. For the last 10 years, for the present, and for long into the foreseeable future, bin Laden has damaged our country fundamentally.
It took a century to move from the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and we, as a nation, have still not fully embraced and implemented those civil rights. May G-d have mercy on us may it take much shorter to work through the pernicious and pervasive effects of this evil winner, Osama bin Laden.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
