He has paid. Osama bin Laden spent nearly a decade scurrying on spindly legs like a hairy arachnid through a web of his own construction to avoid American justice — until, at last, as President Obama said last night in his appropriately triumphant and elegiac remarks, “justice has been done.”
Bin Laden did not get away with it. That is what is most important — morally, politically, strategically.
His attacks on the United States have been answered over the course of the past 10 years with a war in Afghanistan, counterinsurgent attacks in Iraq, and counterterrorist sacrifices and hardships that have changed American daily life for the worse.
And now bin Laden has been made to answer for all that and for his murders.
He has been made to answer not only for the evil of 9/11 but for the monstrous acts that preceded 9/11 — the bombing of a US residence in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the destruction of two US embassies in Africa in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
Bin Laden killed our soldiers and our diplomats before turning his spectacular evil on ordinary civilians and tourists on that brilliantly cloudless day burned in our memory like the black gash that tore a hole in the sky over Ground Zero as the fires bin Laden lit slowly, slowly burned themselves out.
Bin Laden has, finally, been held to account.
This was a necessary conclusion, even though the war he set in motion has not yet concluded.
It was necessary for the families of the murdered, so that they could know the incarnate evil that stilled the hearts of those they loved no longer had a beating heart himself.
It was necessary for New York City, which somehow lost the thread of what was so crucial about the rebuilding of what bin Laden destroyed perhaps because there was something hauntingly unfinished about the event itself.
It was necessary for the United States military and all the people who have worked on the front lines in the war on terror, because his continued invisibility was an abscess — a putrid absence whose foulness sullied their astonishing successes in Afghanistan, Iraq, in the intelligence-gathering that prevented more American blood from being shed by bin Laden.
That abscess has been removed.
It was necessary for the reputation of the United States. After
9/11, our president said we would get bin Laden dead or alive, and then we didn’t get him. This was a failure of a sort that can engender a slow and steady loss of respect in the eyes of the world.
It was necessary for the safety of the United States because it puts future would-be terrorists on notice: You attack the United States and we will get you. You may use suicide bombers to do your dirty work, but if you are unwilling to follow the suicide path, you will still meet their end.
The message of the bin Laden killing is this: We are not the “weak horse” Osama bin Laden said we were after we left Somalia in 1993.
We are still here.
And he rots in hell.