So today Osama Binladen has been found and killed, it's been on every news bulletin on every channel almost exclusively all day. Now I agree that this is an important day and that he has paid for the many things done in his name, but... In the afformentioned news bulletins there is coverage of a giant party in New York where people are celebrating, saying how proud they are and that it's finally over and that's where my problem is.
Lets deal with these things in reverse order shall we. Firstly it's most definitely not over, Osama was a figure head for a movement which is based on small autonomous cells. This isn't a case of cut of the head and the body dies, it's more of a whack a mole kind of affair, yes he was a pretty big scalp to be taken down but there's still plenty of nut jobs left to fight and most of them are going to be pretty irrate about now. So the British and American governments are expecting retaliatory strikes.
Next is the out pouring of pride. Ok this one is a little more appropriate, after all, the soldiers were asked to go in to a hostile base and pacify it. They did what had to be done and put themselves in harms way to achieve it, to give them anything less than our support and recognition for their bravery would be an insult. However there was a long campaign using mountainous quantities of ordinance, intelligence agencies and basically the full might of the American army to find and kill one guy and his bodyguards. This was rather like using a tactical nuke to crack a nut and taking a good few years to succeed. Yes we can honour the soldiers but the result was fairly inevitable.
So now we come to the last one, the celebration itself. Thousands upon thousands of people are currently rejoicing that a man has been hunted down and killed, we are revelling in the successful murder of a human being, I'm certainly not excusing his actions or those of his followers, they are terrible atrocities for which even his death isn't justice enough and there is a lot of high emotion to be released. But aren't we supposed to be better than them? What I saw on television was one step short of burning an Osama shaped effigy while waving guns around. If it had included those two things it would have looked exactly like the sort of displays you often see coming from the middle east.
A bad man has been killed, this is a good thing, but this isn't over yet and I certainly don't believe we should be celebrating that we were required to stoop to his level to get what we want.
