(2011-05-02) Bin Laden Killed

OsamaBin Laden was killed.

Juan Cole gives a great retrospective on Bin Laden, Afghanistan, the Revolts Of 2011, etc. The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don’t want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil.

• he also corrects 10 myths.

May05 update: supposedly he hadn't left that compound once in the past 5 years.

May10 update: Juan Cole on the secret Pakistan deal with the US to let us go in. The agreement even stipulated that the Pakistani government would be constrained by public opinion to condemn the US action in the aftermath, however insincere the rebuke might be... Ultimately, the key to the erratic behavior of the Pakistani government toward the US and its interests lies in a basic contradiction. The Pakistani elite is wedded to the $3 billion in aid that the US donated to them in 2010. That elite is also allied with the US against some of the Taliban factions. On the other hand, the Pakistani officer corps sees Afghanistan as their sphere of influence, and refuses to cede it to the US. Elements of the Inter-Services Intelligence seem to be allied with Jalaluddin Haqqani and his network, which fights the US and Karzai in Afghanistan and is based in North Waziristan. These contradictions make it tough for the Pakistani political class to save face. But that is what Gilani and others were trying to do in his recent speech. This is the sort of deal that argues against WikiLeaks' leaking diplomatic cables - 2010-11-28-WikileaksUsDiplomaticCables (but I still prefer to err on the side of transparency).