Habemus Corpus

[Plaid Adder]

When we heard about the announcement we were sure that it wasn't going to be good news. My partner's first speculation was that maybe poor Joe Biden had had a heart attack. I'm glad it was leaked early, because if I'd had to sit and watch the NBC News crew blather and speculate for an hour the stress might have made my head explode.

So. We have Osama Bin Laden's body.

It is kind of hard to believe; it's also kind of hard to feel. The jubilation with which the news has been greeted is not something resounding in our household, where we are more worried about what to do if PJ winds up hearing about this. She's only 3, and we haven't told her yet about 9/11. But mainly what impresses me as I sit here trying to write about this is: This is not really the news that I have been waiting for, these past 10 years.

What I have been waiting for is the news that the war is over. By "the war" I mean the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the war on terror, the war, the war, the war that George W. Bush announced in his first address to Congress after 9/11, the war that has become so much a part of American life that we have forgotten what it was like before.

It is possible that now that we have our corpse and our trophy and our bragging rights and all the rest of it, it will be politically easier to end the war in Afghanistan. About that, I would be glad. About this...well, after all that's been destroyed in the past ten years in the name of getting Bin Laden, just about anything would be an anticlimax.

Obviously it's good for our side that it was Obama who made that announcement and not George W. Bush or, God help us all, President Trump. I would feel more joy about that if I felt better about "our side" these days. Nevertheless, I will say that it's quite possible that the reason this happened on Obama's watch and not Bush's is that Obama actually thought getting Bin Laden was important, whereas for Bush's team and their priorities it was really better if Bin Laden was at large, because that gave them the excuse they needed to get their war on.

The NBC talking heads seem very convinced that Bin Laden's death marks the end of an era, even as they reassure us that the war on terror will continue. I hope it does mean the end of an era--an era that I have to say, I could barely stand living through. I hope that symbolically this will make some things possible that were not considered possible up to now. I hope that maybe we will actually see the war end now.

I have not much more to say about it, really, except that I'm glad to be still here to post about it on DU, which sustained me through the worst of the post-9/11 years. I hope that good will come of this. We'll see what happens.

The Plaid Adder