The justification for and satisfaction at the killing of the most prominent international terrorist of our time rests upon some debatable claims: that he was ‘uniquely’ evil, that the quantity he killed was ‘exceptional’.
Despite the overwhelming welcome and relief in the west at the news, behind it all there are strange notes of unease. Was it right to shoot him dead without any attempt to capture him, bring him back and put him on trial for his actions, when he was, apparently, once the ‘fog of war’ cleared, not fighting back, not armed and when, as most commentators assumed (perhaps mistakenly or perhaps not), he had not for some time had the ability to direct active terrorist campaigns?
The thought that ultimately put these qualms to rest was that he had ‘declared war on western civilisation’. The term is applied here in a way that is both hideously real and also metaphorical. However, wars between states are (or were) started with a declaration and ended with a treaty: the ‘war against terrorism’, like the ‘war against drugs’, is a war without beginning or end. The US officially regarded him as 'an emeny conbattant in war', though that had not prevented them from also indicting him in a criminal court in Manhattan in 1998.
Yet, in his own terms, declare war on us he certainly did, though the idea that he had any chance of destroying our civilisation, devastating its economy or overthrowing its cultural life and social organisation seems fanciful. Elements within our societies have done more to achieve all of those ends, and in very recent years, than he could ever aspire to.
There are plenty of places in the world where in recent and current times more innocent lives have been lost, more hideous suffering imposed, more human trust betrayed, more gruesome methods of inflicting pain been devised (and where much of the responsibility can be plausibly laid at the doors of individuals) than is the case here with terrorist outrages in western and other cities. Think of central Africa, the Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, to name only those that are not contentious to western political assumptions.
But somehow, I think, we in the west have the lazy and self-indulgent feeling all that was somehow their own fault; they brought it on themselves; the suffering and bloodshed were within and part of their own lives and societies. Ultimately, this implies, they were not as innocent as those who fell from the twin towers – perhaps not even the baby hacked to death by machete in its sleep in Rwanda.
Those people in central Africa were not ours; we did not know them; we will not on the tenth anniversary of their deaths be interviewing their surviving relatives on our news programmes. That, in itself, is a natural limitation on the expression of human empathy, but, as we interfere in far distant parts of the world, we need to keep under constant and deliberate review what restraints human empathy ought to place on our actions. In northern Pakistan it seems we have far abandoned that humane review. 'Predator drone' has entered the western joke lexicon, even, it seems, that of the President and Commander in Chief.
In our apprehensions, he was an ogre from beyond (he even looked the part – tall, straggly bearded, staring eyes, threatening mouth), who declared war on us and brought death and suffering from a realm outside our control or responsibility. He struggled hard to impose himself on Muslim and eastern minds, and for a while and in part, succeeded, as the fount, figurehead and active, gun-toting leader and mastermind of a ruthless armed struggle against assumed western and Christian oppression of and disrespect for his peoples and his religion. And he would not have succeeded as he did if there were not things for which we should reproach ourselves in our historic and present treatment of the peoples of the east. But beyond the actual spectacular and murderous outrages, his success was even greater in cultural than in practical terms, and perhaps greater amongst us, his victims and enemies, than among his own, whom he also did not scruple to kill and maim.
