United States President Barack Obama, riding high in the polls, his re-election virtually assured, is now free to bask in the glow of his all-American victory in the global "war on terror", which his administration had rechristened "overseas contingency operations" (OCO). The Osama Bin Laden hit on Monday was indeed an OCO - a swift, overseas "kinetic military action" surmounting innumerable contingencies such as the violation of the aerial space of a theoretically sovereign nation.
Yet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first reaction was to stress the "war on terror" in fact goes on forever, true to the spirit of the Pentagon's own slogan, "The Long War". That applies especially to the ultra-strategic AfPak theater. It's as if commander-in-chief Obama could not but be a regal prisoner in a labyrinth not of his own making.
The White House's move to break out of the labyrinth was to paradoxically go ballistic and seal the death of the 9/11 trauma, capitalized by the George W Bush administration as a license to kill evil - be it in itself or in the form of an axis - and thus affirm Jeffersonian freedom. From 2001 to 2008, those were the years when the hyperpower - on a mission from God and focused as a laser on a Hegel/Fukuyama "end of history" - simply trampled over international law.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were supposed to be only the first two stops on the way to redemption (then there would be the road to Damascus, Tehran and even Tripoli ...) What was christened as The Greater Middle East project was supposed to smash "terror" and the regimes that sheltered it; the Taliban Afghanistan and - in the neo-con vision - Saddamist Iraq. Others would inevitably fall like dominoes.
