On Sunday, President Barack Obama announced that after nearly ten years of actively hunting Osama bin Laden – whose terror network perpetrated the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — U.S. Special Forces had found and killed the al Qaeda leader.
News of the successful special ops mission almost immediately prompted celebrations in New York’s Times Square and outside the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Elected officials issued statements calling it a great night for America. Television correspondents smiled amidst ebullient citizens.
While it is unquestionably true that the world is a better place with one less mass murderer in it, killing is not something that we should be celebrating. Bin Laden and his followers are the ones who celebrate death. Why should we want to emulate them?
We are the richest country in the world, by many measures. We should be making peace, not war. We should be building bridges, not burning bridges.
Sadly, our response to the Sept. 11 attacks was to make war.
President Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, launched not one, but two expensive occupations that have cost America trillions. In the end, those occupations didn’t help us get Osama bin Laden. As Sunday’s raid showed, he was hiding out in suburban Pakistan, less than a mile from a Pakistani military academy. And he was killed in what went down as a police action.
A small, elite contingent of SEALs arrived by helicopter and stormed the compound that had been built to shelter him, like a highly trained SWAT team. They killed bin Laden and some of his entourage, took possession of the deceased Al Qaeda leader’s body, and left.
The raid proves that we could have eliminated bin Laden without invading Afghanistan, let alone Iraq. After more than ten years in Afghanistan, we have neither defeated the Taliban – who bin Laden bought protection from – nor succeeded in instituting a stable and democratic government to run Afghanistan.
What are we doing there?
In attacking our capital and largest city on Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his followers were seeking not to defeat us militarily, but rather to instigate panic. They gambled that they could, with a coordinated strike, bring down the United States financially. It’s sobering to realize how close they came to realizing their goal. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and financing those invasions on credit, the Bush administration played right into Al Qaeda’s hands. The occupation of Iraq is finally coming to an end, but we remain in Afghanistan, with no end in sight.
We are not going to defeat terrorism through military might. If we truly want a more peaceful world, we need to be peacemakers. And if we want to protect our freedoms, we ourselves must be free from fear.
No democracy can survive if it is gripped by fear. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address to the American people in 1932, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
The day that we have heeded FDR’s words is the day that we should celebrate.
We cannot and must not live in fear. We cannot allow ourselves to be tricked into giving up our own freedoms in exchange for the promise of greater security.
In the words of one of Benjamin Franklin’s timeless works: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Nor can we win a conflict against a noun. That doesn’t mean we can’t counteract hatred and violence around the world – it just means that the best ways to stop terrorism do not involve the use of force.
The peoples of Tunisia and Egypt managed to topple oppressive regimes through largely peaceful protests. While not every pro-democracy movement everywhere has been as successful, such movements hold more promise for replacing despots than occupations by a foreign power. Where such movements exist, we ought to support them.
The most fitting response to Osama bin Laden’s death would be for our Commander in Chief to bring our troops home, and for Congress to repeal the Patriot Act. Those actions would tell the world that we are done living in fear, and that we are ready to fight terrorism through more effective, peaceful means.
And it would give us all a real reason to celebrate.
Andrew Villeneuve, a 2005 Redmond High graduate, is the founder and executive director of the Northwest Progressive Institute, a Redmond-based grassroots organization. Villeneuve can be reached at andrew@nwprogressive.org.
