Thoughts on Osama

When thinking about the news this week about the death of America’s most wanted target, Osama Bin Laden, I wasn’t sure about how to exactly take it.  At times over the last ten years, I’ve like many of you, lost focus and doubted that he was either alive or that we would ever find him.  I have been doubting that he had anything much to do with Al-Qaida anymore other than being their so-called ‘spokesman’.  I think the information that came out about where he was living where there was no phone or internet access confirms my previously held suspension.  Since 9/11, we took away what he managed to do to the world which was to create a sense of insecurity in his daily life and for the most part, that seemed to be good enough for me.  To me, this relationship I had with him had never been personnel, I knew of no one that was affected by any of these tragedies conducted under his guidance and my outrage which mostly came in the form of disappointment, was toward the most expensive, well equipped military that could not find their ‘man’ for ten years in the eastern part of Afghanistan and/or in Pakistan.

I am elated that we did finally catch him and that our greater than twenty-seven billion dollar a year CIA did their job.  It was also nice to see for once, that vastly different sections of our government can properly collaborate, from the intelligence officers gaining information, to the president and staffers developing a plan, to the military executing that plan to perfection.  If anything, this gives me faith that government can work.

On the other hand, Bin Laden died how he wanted, a martyr and a billboard for someone else to step up in his place and cause further extremism.  I would have liked us to find him hiding in a hole like Sadaam Hussein (no relation) and undergo a trial and be executed within the legal system.  Maybe I am picking needles in a haystack but doesn’t everyone have their tiny fantasies about how his end would come.  I have no problem with the mission or the results of the mission, it was just a minor of a hope of mine, that when the time did come when America crossed paths with Osama, that it would be a Sadaam Hussein like encounter.