Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts explains: "Americans are too busy celebrating to think, a capability that seems to have been taken out of their education.”

"Americans are so enthralled over the death of bin Laden that they do not wonder why information gleamed years ago would take so long to locate a person who was allegedly living in a million-dollar building equipped with all the latest communication equipment next to the Pakistani Military Academy. Allegedly, the ‘most wanted criminal’ was not moving from hide-out to hide-out in desolate mountains, but ensconced in luxury quarters in broad daylight. Despite his obvious location, it took the CIA years to find him after claiming to have gained information of his whereabouts out of captives in secret prisons. This is the image of the CIA as the new Keystone Cops.”

Like the Canadian Mounties, in the end, Navy Seal Unit 6, armed with lethal weapons and an attack dog, got their man – with not inconsiderable collateral damage – in what The New York Times called an “extremely one-sided encounter.”

It was, let’s admit, a liquidation, right out of the KGB playbook.
Yes, there was a political agenda here too: the bin Laden operation was part of a chain of calculated presidential promoting exercises including the announcement of his re-election campaign and massive fund-raising effort, his deals with the Repugs on the budget, the release of his birth certificate, his interview with Oprah, his shakeup of sorts of the Pentagon, his bringing the CEO of GE and William Daley into the White House, on and on.

The ‘new’ Obama wants to be seen as a warrior, not a pacifist, as long as he is not forced to go after the Wall Street. Right now, his victory is viewed widely for what it is: vengeance or in the words of the street, payback.

Nailing Bin-Laden has to be seen in the context of his Spring offensive grounded in symbolic advances, to get his poll numbers up and his campaign rolling, to make him look invincible, and to ‘triangulate,’ by moving to the center and pre-empting/co-opting the right. He now has Bush and Cheney praising him.

Roberts explains, “Obama needed closure of the Afghan war and occupation in order to deal with the US budget deficit. Subsequent statements from Obama regime officials suggest that the agenda might be to give Americans a piece of war victory in order to boost their lagging enthusiasm. The military/security complex will become richer and more powerful, and Americans will be rewarded with vicarious pleasure in victory over enemies.”

Tom Engelhardt, author of The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, believes, “Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos, and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighborhood.”

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