Bin Laden arrives in hell

Once again, life imitates Tom Clancy.

The most recent book by the guy who wrote about a terrorist using an airplane as a weapon (crashing it into the Capitol, admittedly, rather than the World Trade Center or the Pentagon) well before 9-11 features the capture by JSOC troops of the Emir- the guy responsible for 9-11 in the Clancy universe, and an obvious stand-in for Osama bin Laden.

Yesterday the JSOC boys, apparently acting on a tip from Pakistani sources, located and killed bin Laden. They even secured his body so that there can be no doubt as to his identity. Justice has been served at last.

It is tempting to point out the symmetry of bin Ladin being killed under the administration of a president of the same party whose trashing of our intelligence capabilities made 9-l1 possible in the first place. Or to point out the irony of the fact that it's that president's party (though notably not Mr. Obama himself) who has been urging for so long that we cut and run in Afghanistan, and let the bin Ladens of the future breed undisturbed. Or how close we came to getting bin Laden at Tora Bora, in the days following the beginning of the Afghan war. Or the number of times the order Mr. Obama gave that led to bin Laden's death has been given before.
Or that Mr. Obama's suggestion that in directing DCI Paneta to make bin Laden's death or capture the CIA's number one priority he was somehow changed the priorities the agency had under Dubyah is hard to credit.

Or that it's about time that the Administration that Couldn't Shoot Straight finally shot something other than its own foot.

But whether he can justly take credit for it or not, the fact is that we got bin Laden on Barack Obama's watch. He will get credit for it; that's the way the game works. And as inane as the crowing about the fact that it was under Obama rather than Bush that we got bin Laden may be, we'll just have to put up with it.

So congratulations, Mr. President. Those of us who are your political critics will just have to suck it up. And Americans of all political persuasions can rejoice that th evil man responsible for the deaths of so many innocents has been brought to the bar of what, ironically, was the first code name given to the war in Afghanistan: Infinite Justice.