As a fledgling politician in Chicago, Barack Obama was advised more than once by consultants that he might want to consider changing his name—all three of them, in fact. “Barry” would be a great deal less foreign-sounding than Barack, one media consultant told him, and “Hussein” was a middle name reminiscent, for many, of an Iraqi tyrant and worth consigning to oblivion. As for his last name, well, to carry around a perfect rhyme for the most notorious terrorist in the world was a political liability beyond imagining. In the post 9/11 world, “Obama” was a cheap tabloid pun waiting to happen. Nevertheless, the young South Side politician ignored the advice, won a U.S. Senate seat, in 2004, and took the oath of office as President on January 20, 2009 using the same name that appears on his Hawaiian birth documents (both the long and short versions): Barack Hussein Obama, II.
As Obama said Sunday night from the East Room of the White House, he had long ago promised to make a priority of bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Now “justice has been done,” the President said as he announced that a team of American intelligence operatives killed bin Laden in a firefight in Pakistan. His late-night statement—sober, direct, even, at times, thick-tongued with nervousness—rightly avoided any note of triumphalism, any hint of the “U.S.A! U.S.A.!” “Yes We Can!” cheering coming from the crowd outside the White House gates in Lafayette Park. But there could be no mistaking his relief, the national relief, that the symbolic and ideological head of a hideous multinational terror organization, responsible for the deaths of many thousands, was gone at last.
Steve Coll has brilliantly outlined the life of bin Laden and his family in his book “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century” and Lawrence Wright has done no less in describing the rise of Al Qaeda and bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in his “The Looming Tower.”
But what of Obama’s history with Osama bin Laden?
In September, 2001, Obama was an obscure state senator from Hyde Park. He had just lost badly in an attempt to win away a congressional seat from the former Black Panther and local favorite Bobby Rush. In the wake of that humbling, Michelle Obama was hoping that her husband would quit politics once and for all, and Obama was thinking about it.
On September 19, 2001, little more than a week after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade towers, Obama’s local paper, the Hyde Park Herald, published a series of reactions to the events from the two U.S. senators from Illinois, Richard Durbin and Peter Fitzgerald; Bobby Rush; and minor local pols like Obama.
In his brief article for the Herald, Obama started out by writing some routine lines about renewing security standards at airports, strengthening intelligence networks, and “dismantling” the networks of those who carried out “these heinous attacks.” Ordinary stuff. But he also talked about “the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness.”
“The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others,” he wrote. “Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity….”
“We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad,” he went on. “We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin American, Eastern Europe, and within our own shores.”
It was precisely that kind of talk that was branded as “soft” in the wake of 9/11 and throughout the Bush years, straight through the 2008 election campaign. It was precisely that sort of attempt to talk not merely in the register of prosecution and military aggression, but also of understanding root causes, whether at an anti-Iraq war rally in Chicago or at a Presidential speech in Cairo, that left so many wondering if Barack Obama would have the strength to “go after” Osama bin Laden. Now there is an answer.
There is no getting around the fact that Osama bin Laden—a murderer of the most vicious sort—succeeded on his own terms in so many ways. He was the inspiration not only for the most catastrophic attack on American shores since the Second World War, as well as many other bloody attacks around the world; he also managed in his ugly lifetime to distort, confuse, and undermine the course of political history all over the world, not least in the United States. The day of Osama’s death is a great relief, a moment of real justice. It is no less joyful to know that at the root of the “Arab Spring” is a yearning to end tyranny, not to bring it on in its most fundamentalist forms. But the work of conquering bin Ladenism does not end with the work of killing bin Laden. The fight against obscurantism and terror remains infinitely complex and demands, among other things, political leadership that acknowledges the importance of mind and heart, as well as muscle.
