Bin Laden Is Dead

Awesome NYT photograph, via Balloon Juice:

Update:  James Fallows, scoring the President's speech last night, highlights what will hopefully be the best outcome of the killing of Osama Bin Laden:

5) The potential significance: an end to the distortions of the GWOT? For years anti-terrorism experts have stressed the decentralized, self-sustaining nature of al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations around the world. The elimination of the celebrated symbol and inspiration of the movement will certainly not mean the end of terrorist threats, and in the short run could trigger revenge attacks. (I will be leaving from LAX tomorrow morning; will be interesting to see whether the security drill is different in any way.)

But here is potentially the greatest significance of this news, apart from the "bringing justice to our enemies" satisfaction: it holds the potential of marking an end to the otherwise un-endable "Global War or Terror."

Signifying an end to a "global war" does not mean the end of a threat. America faces a daily threat from crime; for the foreseeable future Americans and others will face a continuing threat of terrorist attack; the entire world faces a threat that the thousands of nuclear warheads still in existence could destroy millions, through accidental or deliberate misuse. But we classify all those as threats, requiring our continued vigilance and best efforts to prevent them. Rather than as ongoing, open-ended wars with the consequent distortions that wars can impose on our values, institutions, and public lives.

 As long as the "Global War on Terror" was defined as eliminating all threat of terrorist activity, it could never be ended. That threat -- like other threats -- will never completely go away. But if this admittedly symbolic victory in the "war" can be taken as closing a loop opened ten years ago (and earlier, with previous OBL-inspired attacks), perhaps it could free us to continue the vigilance while beginning to correct the decade-long warping of our values. That is another gift the commandos who carried out this mission may have given America. We will see whether Obama is willing to lead that way, and others are willing to follow.

I agreed with Fallows when he called for Declaring Victory in the War on Terror, and I also hope that we can use this as an opening to back off on all the crazy actions taken in the name of the War on Terror.