Thoughts on bin Laden's Death

So unless you've been living under a rock, you've become aware that American troops killed Osama bin Laden yesterday.  This event has stirred a lot of different reactions in the US.  Most disturbing are the belligerent celebrations of the death of a human being.  Relief is one thing; I think both of the wars are immoral and unnecessary, but I can't say I'm not relieved that bin Laden is no longer with us.  But jubilation over the death of a human--any human--is too much.  Have more respect for life.  I can't believe I have to tell a nation of ostensibly Christian people this--remember how your god said all that shit about loving thy neighbor as thyself and turning the other cheek and not being happy about people getting killed?!  Try practicing what you preach before telling my atheist, human-life-respecting ass that I'm going to hell.

I have, however, been relieved that the voices saying basically what I did (just less bitterly) have been considerably more numerous than I expected.  It turns out the people of this country aren't as universally stupid, ignorant and brutally self-centered as I tend to characterize them.  Who knew that someone who speaks almost entirely in hyperbole could be wrong.  (See?  That last sentence was hyperbole, too!  Shit, I'm on a roll!)

Listening to the radio today (yeah, I'm an NPR-listening leftist), I heard several callers on various programs express their disappointment that bin Laden had not been apprehended alive to face trial for his crimes.  Quite frankly, given the sad state of what passes for justice for suspected terrorists in US custody nowadays, I'm glad he's just fucking dead.  It's ironic that, in reportedly giving him a burial at see in accordance with Muslim tradition, we treated him in death with far more respect than we've afforded his alleged co-belligerents illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons throughout the world.  The more I think about that, the more fucked up the whole situation seems to me.

There's one thing that's I've found to be missing from the conversation on bin Laden: perspective.  I don't mean that this is a largely symbolic victory--that's been covered.  I mean that, as we mourn the approximately three thousand victims of 9/11, and make speeches that discuss the ten-year search for bin Laden and the justice that has finally been visited upon him, there seems to be no awareness that in the process of that ten-year hunt, we've killed a shitful of innocent people.  Even ignoring the ones we didn't directly kill, but who would almost certainly be alive today if it weren't for the wars we started, we have the blood of untold thousands of civilians on our hands, collateral damage of what is being depicted in the media as a righteous crusade in response to one man's evil deeds.  Perhaps bin Laden and 9/11 justified what we subsequently unleashed on the world.  (I don't think it did; even by extremely conservative estimations, we have killed many times the number of people that died in 9/11, and justice is in no small part about proportional response.  But that is a topic for another day.)  But the reality of the matter is that this war/these wars were wars, no matter what you think about their morality, and that we destroyed huge numbers of people who had offered us no offense, and whose only crime was living in a crappy country.

I don't really have a point to all this, other than the blood on our own hands is something we ought to be considering as well.  No one comes out of any war squeaky clean.  Maybe if we remembered that a little better, we wouldn't start so fucking many of them.