The War of Ideals

Well, after 10 years, Osama bin Laden is dead. As we've all heard by now, he was killed in a US military raid on his palatial compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Spontaneous celebration broke out in many places across the country. Twitter lit up with doubts, praise, and gallows humor. But a question remains in my mind: what, precisely, have we destroyed?

I have no head for politics. I've always been suspicious of the will to power, though I understand that people need leaders. It is a rule without exception that power corrupts; we can only hope to put in power those who are less corruptible than others. No one is incorruptible. All that said, layperson that I am, I cannot begin to try and predict what might be ahead for us now. Are we in less danger? Are we freer? Have we banished a darkness? At the risk of sounding like a pessimist, it doesn't feel like it.

Long have we been at war. Our foes are immaterial, ideals more than people; perhaps I can't be as ecstatic about bin Laden's death as some seem to be because, though he masterminded the largest attack on US soil, he was more effective as a symbol than he really was as a man. And we all know that symbols don't die - they simply shift from one person to the next.

I don't know what's to come. Maybe there will be a huge backlash. Maybe there will be no backlash at all. The War of Ideals is not fought on a battleground; there are no front lines. President Obama has repeatedly stated that we are not at war with Islam. In the speech he gave just two nights ago, in which he announced bin Laden's death, he insisted that Osama was not a Muslim leader. In light of that, I'd like to point out that bin Laden was given a Muslim burial. He was a Sunni, and the founder of al-Qaeda, a militant Islamist group. I submit, while not intending to mount any kind of pulpit here, that Mr. Obama may have worried about how it might sound to the "Massacre those who insult Islam" crowd if he were to openly declare war on their religion. Whatever happens, I can promise that "Islam" will continue to reside on the lips of the concerned, even as those very mouths move to deny that ideology has anything to do with the current conflicts.

We have killed a man. Have we achieved our revenge? The beliefs that make us capable of killing people en masse, the mandates that we believe make us responsible for saving our own from metaphysical corruption - or from imagined persecution - will persist in spite of the destruction of one of their purveyors. The War of Ideals is unaffected by the limited resources of the combatants. After all, when it comes to division and violent xenophobia, our resources are very nearly boundless.