It's irrelevant. It may be a rockin' Hollywood thriller - an Osama/Obama double bill (directed by Kathryn "Hurt Locker" Bigelow). But the targeted assassination - allegedly with an iconic American bullet to the head - of Osama bin Laden on Monday in fact only matches the irrelevancy the larger than life jihadi Godfather had sunk into.
But was it "justice" - as Obama claimed? Justice - up to the age of the drone - implied a crime scene, evidence, courts, due process, a jury, a judge and a sentence. Former President George "war on terror" W Bush, in his bluntness, was closer to the mark: this was more like "US revenge".
The CIA is spinning this was a kill operation. That's also shaky. Capturing Bin Laden alive - just as with Saddam Hussein - would have been the ultimate minaret of humiliation, and a much juicier public relations coup for the White House. That may explain Washington's zeal to dispose of his body in the Arabian Sea as soon as possible - to the despair of many a sharia law specialist.
Yet the US won't leave Afghanistan. US Secretary of States Hillary Clinton is already monopolizing the narrative saying the war on al-Qaeda, as in "war on terror", goes on forever. Official US policy as the best jihadi recruiter Bin Laden could have hoped for goes on unabated - as in the same panoply of soldiers, mercenaries, CIA killer teams, killer drones, contractors and "diplomats" costing trillions of dollars.
