WASHINGTON,
D.C. -- Of course, we're celebrating. And of course, they're
threatening retaliation. Osama bin Laden is dead, and with him died as
much twisted malice as can be found in a man who would send jetliners
into office buildings. But is there closure? Well, some satisfaction
for those who lost loved ones through his depraved orders. There's
definitely pride, yes, in the Navy Seals who stormed the mansion that
concealed the creep. And also in American intelligence, which labored
day after day to find him -- and well before his signature abomination
of 10 years ago, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By
happenstance, I was walking past the White House at about 7 p.m. on
what was still an ordinary Sunday evening. Only a dozen tourists stood
outside the president's house. A raggedy man shouted paranoid ravings
into a bullhorn. Another stood nearby, mumbling quietly. A few short
hours later, the same environs exploded with joy as revelers, many
students at nearby George Washington University, ran to the White House
security limits with flags and song. There was no greater reminder of
what the outrage of Sept. 11, 2001, had wrought than those walls,
fences and other separations that surround every important building in
Washington, D.C. This one especially. The White House may have been
a 9/11 target saved only by passengers on United Airlines Flight 93,
who overcame their hijackers, causing the craft to crash in a field
near Pittsburgh. The Department of Homeland Security was created in
response to the Sept. 11 outrages. Tom Ridge, the agency's first
secretary, offered some sobering truths on bin Laden's demise. He first
noted the obvious, that "the ideology did not die with Osama bin Laden," Al-Qaida
and its ilk have new leaders, new training locations, new homegrown
terrorists in the United States, Ridge added. The threat is "frankly
not terribly diminished by the fact that he's been brought to justice." After
Sunday's big news, families of Flight 93 victims announced that Osama
"can no longer spread his evil." True, but there's plenty of evil left
in other people, and we hold our breath waiting to see how bin Laden's
minions will try to remind us that they go on. Nothing frustrates
terrorists more than evidence of their impotence and vulnerability.
They've been bypassed in the Arab Spring uprisings of young people
demanding modern democracy (though they may try to worm their way into
the change). That Arab youth seem to be ignoring al-Qaida's medieval
ideology is a stick in their eye -- or, to use another metaphor, a pin
in their balloon of self-importance. The demise of their supposedly
untouchable leader undercuts the myth of invincibility. Wounded dogs
can be dangerous. American embassies and airports around the world are
on high alert. U.S. citizens abroad are warned not to draw attention to
themselves -- certainly not to gloat publicly about bin Laden's
comeuppance. Osama bin Laden had a master's mind, but his was not
the only bizarrely wired brain in the extremist underworld. Remember
that America entered the age of terrorism not on Sept. 11, 2001, but on
April 19, 1995, the day a native son blew up a federal office building
in Oklahoma City. The means to cause widespread mayhem remain, and
so does the communications revolution that empowers the criminally
insane to recruit the like-minded. No potion dropped in the water
supply can cure vicious megalomaniacs of their destructive desires. So
these simple hopes we hear equating bin Laden's expiration with the end
of World War II are off base. Happy days are not here again. But one
happy day? For sure.
To
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