Obligatory Post on the Death of OBL

Well, the bloodlust has been satisfied and thousands of fratboys and sorority girls are in the streets celebrating a victory in what has become our great national pastime.

I don't begrudge the families of those slaughtered on 9/11 if they should feel vindicated and that justice has been done. My guess is that most will not be carousing on the streets, but rather quietly reflecting about their loss.

My sense, though, is that even if the media crowns this event as the world-historical equivalent of the falling of the Berlin Wall or the taking of Hitler's bunker, the capture and death of OBL means much less than it might have even six months ago. New historical events have outdistanced OBL. For one, Tunisia. Another, Egypt. The political Islam of al-Qaeda -- a misnomer in the sense that its ideology was always more a nihilistic reaction towards modernity and western imperial dominance than a politics (in fact, it is an anti-politics) -- has had its day in the sun. While it has been able to incur sympathy of many in the muslim world given the humiliations of the US imperial presence throughout the Middle East, Palestine, and lack of democracy throughout the Arab world, it never truly offered a plausible political, economic, and social alternative, much less program, for those suffering under autocratic dictatorship and economic de-development. For all the failures of Arab nationalism in the post-colonial era, it at least had an alternative economic vision to Western capitalism and imperialism. The very failure of this alternative laid the seedbed for the growth of political Islamism; the Arab spring has now overturned this soil and planted new seeds and new hopes.

No, the death of OBL will not have much impact upon the Arab world. There will still be off-shoots of supporters, but they will not have the allegiance of the masses, nor be able to capture the imagination of the great majority. Rather, this death will have a much greater impact upon the West, particularly, the United States. For all of Obama's talk about the importance of OBL's capture, he did not allude to a lessening of the threat. The war on terror will continue; early criticisms of the vagueness of a war declared upon a tactic still obtain. Following Rumsfeld, we must ask what metric we can use to measure "victory"? The WOT is just too convenient a spectacle for the power elites of this country, whether they are the military-industrial complex, the media, the increasing surveillance state, or economic elites looking for distractions from the increased inequality and economic precariousness that a majority of people in this country face. Even as we capture the "most dangerous terrorist in the world," the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue (and may actually be prolonged -- see Gareth Porters recent reportage on the supposed troop reductions in Iraq or the talk of extending the occupation of Afghanistan past 2014).  Pakistan's resistance to drone attacks increases, whatever the nature of their cooperation with the US in OBL's death.

So, my fellow Americans, enjoy the celebrations. After all the partying, we will still wake up to three major military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, an economy still in the shitter for the majority, and a political system tone-deaf to the voice of the people. But, hey, at least we got our two-minutes of hate.