Roger Cohen on Osama

NEW YORK — Watching the talk shows, thinking about the tumultuous last American decade, reflecting on the death of Osama bin Laden, I feel grateful for many things but not least this: the invisibility of the heroes.

For once it is the deed itself that speaks. The deed, so often lost in this age of celebrities and reality shows and Donald Trump’s monumental ego, stands unadorned. In its daring, its professionalism and its effectiveness, the deed is there, making words look cheap.

The deed was that of the 79 U.S. commandos, who have met with their commander-in-chief, President Obama, and who are known to one another, but are unknown to us. For secrecy is their covenant.

Dispatched from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, at night, into a triangular compound in the Pakistani military town of Abbottabad, they contrived, in 38 minutes, and despite the loss of one helicopter, to kill the charismatic face of Al Qaeda and gather the largest intelligence cache on this murderous organization ever found. It was an extraordinary achievement that put to rest a gnawing American self-doubt.

I am so grateful that the achievement is not being dissected and adorned in a feeding frenzy of interviews with the Navy Seal forces; that the deed stands whole, not broken down into its component human parts — the work of a team, indivisible and invisible. An America too often blinded by ego and sensation has much to rediscover about teamwork and silent, smart, hard work.

So many times these past days, finding myself back in New York beneath skies of a 9/11 blue, I have heard an internal voice saying, “Oh, please.” It was responding to complaints from the chattering classes that this was “murder,” that there was no “justice,” that Bin Laden’s burial in the North Arabian Sea was “disrespectful.” As if turning four planes into missiles and killing almost 3,000 people were not an act of war.

If there is greater fatuity than second-guessing the split-second decisions of commandos confronted by gunfire, knowing the compound may be wired to explode, and hunting a serial mass murderer unwilling to surrender, then I am unaware of it. Let post-modern, pacifist Germans agonize, and whoever else wishes to writhe on a pin. The rest of us can be satisfied.

More than 1,000 bodies were so pulverized on 9/11 that no trace of them was found, leaving the downtown air filled with their souls. And we are supposed to worry that this killer — of many Muslims, too — may not have gotten appropriate Muslim rites before sliding to his watery grave.

I am grateful for something else: that Bin Laden has been humanized. He thought he carried the Prophet’s message and was able, through a charisma pornographic in its worship of death, to channel an immense Muslim frustration. In taking on America, and staging his own mega-production one September day, he turned himself into myth.

Yet, here he is, hunched, gray-bearded, channel surfing with his remote in search of images of himself. And here he is, with his beard dyed black, betraying the very vanity of the black-haired Arab gerontocracy he professed to loath. Bin Laden is very human here — in his boredom, his ego, his foibles and his weariness.

That is an important reminder. Bin Laden was not the devil. He was a human being. What happened to him, this gentle-eyed killer, can happen: His transformation into a demon is banal. That is why all of our collective vigilance is needed.

Speaking of vigilance, I have to say one word on Pakistan’s blindness. If the country were not nuclear-armed, America would not give it another dime. But it is and America must. Before then, however, Congress is right to demand an answer to this question: Why, of all the places on earth, would Bin Laden choose to live in the very town that houses the elite military academy that is Pakistan’s West Point?

His advisers must have told him that was not a problem. They must have had a reason for saying it was not a problem. Their reason is America’s and the world’s problem. Until it is resolved it will do harm.

I must end with the deed. It was also Obama’s. He’s the guy who said: “It’s a go.” In the duel of Obama with Osama, there was something of fate. The president kept coming back to him. There is strength in humility. Sometimes you have to keep coming back.

Rilke, in a far different context, had this to say of Cézanne’s abiding obsession with apples and wine bottles: “And (like Van Gogh) he makes his ‘saints’ out of such things: and forces them — forces them — to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and all glory, and he doesn’t know whether he has succeeded in making them do it for him. And sits in the garden like an old dog, the dog of his work that is calling him again and that beats him and lets him starve.”

For America, long starved of the satisfactions sustained purpose brings, the decade-old work is done.

NYT