On my way back from the library tonight, I received a text message from Hanna, letting me know that Osama bin Laden was killed. I was a little surprised, since bin Laden has been a non issue recently, despite the fact that the actions of his organization almost ten years ago were the catalyst for our never ending 'war on terror'. I turned on NPR and caught the end of President Obama's address to the nation. As I drove home, listening to the president, part of me felt relief and a bit of excitement, but a bigger part of me started to reflect back on what it took us to get to this moment. It's very difficult to not be cynical about this bittersweet 'victory', if that's what we can call it. Mad props, no doubt, go out to the American servicemen and women who worked towards his demise and those who finally carried it out. What keeps running through my head though, is whether or not it was worth the cost.
It's been almost ten years since the attacks of 9/11 and needless to say, a lot has happened since then. Even though our actions in Afghanistan in the 1980's and the resulting blowback, as well as our other actions in parts of the Middle East and Africa, were directly related to the September 11th attacks, I am one of many Americans who believe that invading Afghanistan was the right thing to do. We needed to hit Al Qaeda and the Taliban hard. We seemed to start out on the right track, ousting the Taliban from power and hunting for Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda homeboys.
It didn't take long before things went awry. I don't think it's necessary to go into too much detail about the buildup to the Iraq war and the justifications, as that's been battled back and forth countless times over the past eight years. That being said, it's hard not to look back and wonder how much more quickly we could have killed bin Laden if we hadn't been engaged in our grand Iraq adventure. The 9/11 attacks resulted in the deaths of roughly 3,000 people, maybe more depending on your source. It's terrible that those people died, not taking anything away from that. Also depending on your source, somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of people have been killed in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, as a result of the war on terror, not to mention the number of people turned into refugees. Five years ago, the number of servicemen and women killed, involved in the war on terror, passed the number of people killed on 9/11.
The deaths of thousands of American servicemen and women, the deaths of hundreds of thousands to millions of Iraqis and Afghans, a few trillion dollars (that we had to borrow from China), and increased hatred and vitriol towards the United States and its citizens, all over the world.
I posted the above (or pretty close to it) as my most recent Facebook status update and a friend just asked 'how many more would be lost without the effort?'. I can't say for sure, nobody can, whether or not more Americans would have died if we hadn't launched the war on terror but if you compare the numbers of casualties on 9/11 (combine it with any other terrorist attack against Americans if need be) to the number of casualties as a result of the decade long war on terror, I think you can come to a pretty reasonable conclusion. How about if we had never invaded Iraq? Hindsight is 20/20 but perhaps Saddam Hussein, were he still alive today, would be in the midst of being ousted in another Arab revolution. Just a thought.
Sure there's no doubt that Osama bin Laden was a nasty man who did some terrible, terrible things. He needed to be captured or killed, I agree with that. Was it worth the costs though? Why did it take so long? How many more terrorists and extremists were spawned as a result of our decade long 'war on terror'? Everyone will have an opinion on this, and of course the major media outlets are going to be thrilled to have a big story to spin and exploit and rave about for a couple of weeks until Lindsay Lohan gets arrested again. I just wanted to put some thoughts down while they were fresh.
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