Today, I am taking the day off from work.
And wearing my red white & blue shirt.
Good job, Mr Obama.
But none of America’s actions in the Middle East have anything to do with Bin Laden or Al Qaeda. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi both opposed Al Qaeda. In Afghanistan, Al Qaeda forces have no influence and are thought to be between 50 and 100 strong.
It’s all just about having a really, really big army near all that nice oil.
Good thing. Although instead of dumping his cadaver in the sea they should have put his head on a pike for the ravens to pick clean. But I actually though he was dead many years ago. Splattered on the walls of a cave in Afghanistan. I wonder what on Earth he has been doing all these years. Why no more press releases? My first guess would be that the Pakistani has had him under some form of house arrest. They couldn’t quite make themselves hand him over to the Americans, and yet wouldn’t allow him to do what he wanted.
Hamas condems Bin Laden’s death:
- what the heck is it about Palestinian leaders that makes them unfailingly want to rally behind the absolute worst, lost cause, allies. Saddam, Bin Laden. They might as well shoot themselves in the foot and be done with it.
Not what I’d call the most astute political move.
Oh, get off it. You can’t seriously consider Osama bin Laden to be a victim of the US. That’s beyond the pale.
But how does that play out in the particular current environment?
It has been widely thought that the current populist uprisings in the MENA was marginalizing Al-Qaeda already. Does OBL’s death accelerate that marginalization, if only because a symbol is gone? How does Hamas’s bemoaning the death of OBL hurt them? Any reaction from Iran? And how might their response play out?
The President is still the one who gives them their agenda, sets their priorities.
In early 2002, Bush took special ops units from Afghanistan - units that had learned the local languages and were involved in the hunt for bin Laden - and put them in Iraq.
On taking office, after seven years of neglect, President Obama put the hunt for bin Laden at the top of our intelligence services’ agenda again.
Does Obama deserve full credit? Of course not. Just saying ‘do this’ doesn’t make it happen: a lot of people at many different levels between the Oval Office and - especially! - the team that invaded bin Laden’s compound yesterday surely contributed to this outcome.
But to the extent that we hold Presidents responsible when things go wrong in our nation and the world, Obama deserves the full credit for this, and needs share none of it with his predecessor in the White House.
It hurts them because of their recent accordwith Fatah. Israel and the U.S. are currently on the fence regarding continued negotiations with the Palestinians as a result; this recent statement will hardly reassure them.
Of course, Hamas’s statement may have been specifically designed to sabotage the peace process - in which case, we’ll have to wait and see what their game is.
IMHO, the best resolution would have simply been to give the body back to his family, assuming they would have been willing to take it.
According to one of the news stories, many Muslims believe Islamic law requires a burial within one day. But I’d think we could have gotten the body from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia that quickly.
Folks, note that the comments come from Commissar, friend of Kim Jong Il, supporter of Khaddafi, lover of dictatorships and mass murder. DNFTT.
The 2 things I am most curious about in the aftermath of this will be 1- Does the fact that Abbottabad is essentially the home of the Pakistani West Point point to the fact that some factions of the government of Pakistan knew OBL was there? and 2- With the charismatic leader gone, will Zahwiri be able to keep the already degraded “coalition” that is Al Qaida together? As some have said here, any bunch can band together and call themselves “Al Qaida in Bumfuckistan”, but that meant being at the Beck and call of OBL and his leadership cell. NPR this morning said that Zahwiri is not as well respected as OBL was (side note: past tense feels good, in this case) and may not have the power to call on as many assets as OBL did.
I’m a little miffed at the sea burial, especially if the photographs of Bin Laden’s body aren’t released. How do we really know this all happened?
I agree with the point you are making here, but we were told, by Donald Rumsfeld, that OBL was in fact sitting in a cave like Dr. Evil.
Anybody remember Rumsfeld on Tim Russert in late 2001?
I watched the celebrations outside the White House pretty carefully, and I didn’t see anyone there but drunken college kids, which says it all, really.
It says the ISI is either complicit or horrifically inept. Neither bodes particularly well for Pakistan or anyone else in the region.
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I just mean…I don’t think Obama had anything to do with it…in the sense that the shouldn’t get full credit. Not with the way intelligence works. Or maybe. I don’t know. Maybe Bush had the opportunity (as some claim) and didn’t go for it.
Still – just seems odd to give Obama credit for something our CIA, military, and special ops carried out.
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He is the commander-in-chief, you know.
Eisenhower gets credit for winning the campaign in Europe during WWII, but he didn’t actually shoot anyone or aim any howitzers or drive any tanks.
Obviously Obama shouldn’t get as much credit as the SEALs who killed bin Laden, or the intelligence personnel who found him, but (1) it’s not like we’ll ever find out who those people were, and (2) you better believe Obama would have been blamed if something went wrong.
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I’m a little miffed at the sea burial, especially if the photographs of Bin Laden’s body aren’t released. How do we really know this all happened?
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You sort of have to take some things as read.
What makes you think a government willing to fake bin Laden’s death wouldn’t also be willing to murder some nameless Afghan hermit and pretend he was bin Laden?
It’s hard to believe the latter especially about something right in their own backyard. My guess is that the Pakistani military knew where Bin Laden was and also that the US had to inform them before attacking. There is no way the US would risk launching this kind of attack in a military town without informing the Pakistanis. Imagine what could have happened if Pakistani military units were surprised by a major gunfight breaking out and had rushed to the scene.
Of course it is possible that the US independently discovered the location of Bin Laden and put massive pressure on the Pakistanis to let them attack. It would have been a huge embarassment for the Pakistani and difficult for them to say no.
There could also have been some kind of quid pro quo perhaps linked to US policy in Afghanistan. Whatever it is, we really don’t know the full picture here and it’s likely to remain that way for years.
This whole Obama/Osama thing is kind of confusing.
Can people write Ben Laden when they mean Osama, otherwise I have the feeling half the posters here wanted to bash the head of their President with a rock.
I guess you could make an argument for the technical/factual accuracy of that statement, but it doesn’t really make sense. “bin Laden,” to us, = 9/11. Why would he hate us for what our enemy did in the 80s?
bin Laden, as we knew him, was the product of us putting our military in Saudi Arabia during Gulf War I and leaving it there (despite promises not to do so.)
It’s very hard to escape the conclusion that someone in the upper echelons of the Pakistani government (or at least in the ISI) knew where he was and was helping to keep it a secret.
Well, not half. 
Agreed. I mean, I believe it most likely happened, but this was really a softball to the conspiracy-minded.
It will be very interesting to hear the whole story, some day.
Sheer speculation, but it probably boils down to our relations with Pakistan. For some reason, the Bush administration trusted Pakistan, and/or was extremely wary of pissing them off. For some reason, the Obama administration flipped 180 degrees on both counts: we can’t trust them, and screw them. We’re going in.
So I think we can stop pretending that Pakistan is a “strategic ally in the war on terror”.
And I can’t wait to see the movie of the raid. 
We apparently have some seriously kick-ass bad-asses on our side.