And the bin Laden Reverb Continues

First off, you’ve got the man with the High IQ blabbing about the troops who nailed Osama. They arrested the Wikileaks guy for giving away this kind of info, but Biden will, of course, just go on being a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Cuz he is *so* much smarter than Palin.

Elsewhere, the riptides continue as Zac Alstin tries to talk sense to people who can see absolutely no difference between the jubilation of Palestinians over the murder of 3000 innocent people and the jubiliation of Americans over the death of the guy who killed those 3000 innocent people.

At the same time, while it is true that the two kinds of rejoicing are by no means morally equivalent, there is still something tragic about the fact that one of the rare moments of national unity we have had in the past decade centers entirely around death, a fact not lost on Alstin’s colleague at Mercatornet.

I tend to think of Jehu, in the Old Testament. He was the closest thing the northern kingdom of Israel ever had to a good king (as an aside, while the southern kingdom of Judah has its ups and downs, absolutely no king of Israel is ever reckoned as a good one by the inspired author). What does Jehu do to make himself, as it were, the cream of the dregs? He takes vengeance on the family of Ahab, the wicked, idolatrous, murdering king whom Elijah confronted. He methodically kills the wicked without mercy. And yet, he is not commended for being good. He is merely an angry instrument of judgment who, having killed his enemies, does not in the slightest evince an interest in God.

The jubilation of our culture of death over the triumph of the Obama Administration in this hour reminds me of this. Our post-Christian state of commerce, abortion and hedonism, has exacted blood from a barbarian just has Jehu exacted blood from the house of Ahab and Jezebel. An evil man is dead and that’s something. But what life, love or joy in the Lord do we have to put in place? It seems to me that the national exultation is hollow, like Jehu’s vengeance. He continued the worship of idols as all the kings of Israel did. And we are increasingly a post-Christian nation of idols too.

Which is why I think Rome was simply right to say that the deeper truth behind the death of bin Laden, once the adrenaline dies down, is that this is cause for reflection, not mere whooping it up. Now that he’d dead, we’re still left with the fact that we are a people who are in full retreat from Jesus Christ and his gospel. Bin Laden’s sins will never send us to hell. Ours can, unless we repent.

In other reverb news, various questions are now arising about the justice of the raid. I’m not terribly inclined to fret about many of them. So, for instance, I’m not too inclined to worry about the violation of Pakistan’s precious sovereignty, since it does look rather like our dear friends the Pakis have been harboring bin Laden knowingly while taking billions of dollars from us as they did so. The last country whose government harbored bin Laden was rightfully invaded by us. If they get off merely with a raid on their treasury to take back our billions, they should consider themselves lucky.

Other issues being raised include the question of whether this was a legitimate act of war or merely a political assassination. This too, I’m not very inclined to judge harshly. The fact is, we know nothing of the circumstances on the ground except that it was dark, our troops were going into terra incognita against unknown numbers with unknown weaponry. The goal was “get bin Laden and don’t get killed”. If (as reports say) bin Laden offered even the slightest resistance, I have no problem with our troops killing him rather than standing around until he got a shot off or raised an alarm that brought jihadis running. In a combat situation, you have to think and act fast. Monday morning quarterbacking from people who have not one clue what the situation on the ground was is, I think, ungrateful to the brave guys who got a difficult job done under trying circumstances.

So, until I see documentation that bin Laden came out with his hands up, begging to be taken into custody and they lined him up against the wall and shot him like the Nazis shot our surrendering troops at Malmedy, I’m not calling the killing of bin Laden an “assassination”. I’m calling it a legitimate act of war against the man who started that war.

Which brings up another point: namely, that we know extremely little about what happened since we have no particular reason to trust the sources of information about the operation, motivated as they are to be dishonest in order to make themselves look good, cover up any wrongdoing, and bend the facts to suit agendas ranging from “get me some vote luv from the American people” to “try to intimidate rather then tick off Bronze Age savages”. So, for instance, as we noted yesterday, the White House dropped the story that bin Laden died hiding behind a woman. Now it’s (wisely, I think) decided not to engage in death porn by releasing photos that will, in any case, never please conspiracy theorists who deny bin Laden’s death (despite the host of evidence apart from the White House’s testimony that he is, in fact, dead).

But apart from the (I think obvious) fact of bin Laden’s death, we know nothing except what we are told. And as long as the bonds of trust between citizen and government are strained, that will mean that we will have to make our judgements about the accuracy of what we are told based on other things than merely “the government says so.”

Typically that will involve our own emotional and psychological need to believe or reject certain things. So the people who, last week, were calling Obama an epic conspiratorial mastermind capable of hiding his Kenyan Muslim True Identity are, this week, hailing his Administration’s account of the raid as self-evidently true and dismissing as treasonous anyone who wonders, “What if bin Laden tried to surrender and was gunned down in cold blood on the President’s orders so that the Obama Administration could have a kill and a boost in the polls during an economic downturn?”

Mark you, I’m not saying that happened. I’m merely pointing out that people who last week had no problem believing that Obama was a bombthrowing radical friend of Bill Ayers who feasts on the blood of unborn children without compunction were, this week, ready to celebrate his oversight of the death of bin Laden as a triumph of the American Way–because they needed to hear a particular narrative of comfort and were ready to ditch previously comforting narratives of evil unAmerican Obama for a comforting narrative of gutsy American Obama without a second thought–in order to have that comforting narrative. To suggest that bin Laden might have been unarmed, willing to surrender, or sound asleep, or unguarded and murdered in cold blood nonetheless is a question nobody wants to examine for evidence because it’s yet another buzzkill in a decade full of buzzkills. Can’t we just be happy we got the bastard, treat Obama’s account as gospel, and move on?

In short, a lot of this is about our own psychology and not about facts–since we have very few actual facts. It’s about the stories we construct in order to deal with a painful world.

For myself, in the absence of facts, I will charitably presume that the official narrative is basically accurate and applaud our troops and their commanders, including Obama, for getting Osama, self-confessed murderer of 9/11. I will also pray that our post-Christian civilization find something more than the death of its enemies as its (vanishingly rare) point of unity. To do that, however, it will need to become Christian again since it is only in Christ that real unity is possible, since it is only in Christ the real charity is possible.