by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n I\u00a0think there will be repercussions from the hit, and most of them will turn out to be good in terms of the War on Terror.<\/p>\n 1) The world must now realize that the domestic antiwar movement is dead, kaput; it cares not a whit whether we assassinate bin Laden or a son of Qaddafi or go into Libya. Everything is on the table now and there are no self-restraints, no snickers on\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em>, no quirky insider winks on Letterman, no Barbara Streisand crazy faxes. A Nobel peace laureate is now the Left\u2019s totem and he can send quite deadly Americans on quite deadly missions as he sees fit \u2014 and without worry about a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0op-ed barrage or an ACLU lawsuit. That gives the US newfound advantages, a veritable blank check, from keeping Guantanamo open indefinitely to using a Cheney \u201cassassination\u201d team and valuable water-boarded intelligence wherever it wishes to. A Harold Koh is not going to be filing any more lawsuits against his government \u2014 he is the government.<\/p>\n 2) For all the talk of \u201cleading from behind\u201d and the quagmire in Libya, the truth is that the U.S. military remains preeminent and transcends the administration in power at any given time. It won the Iraq war, and could easily, if unleashed, take out Qaddafi. The odds are still that it can stabilize Afghanistan. It is hard to imagine another country pulling off an operation of the sort that killed bin Laden. A \u201cpost-America\u201d is simply a choice not to utilize its resources and power in a way it most certainly could with dispatch and success \u2014 as we see, in contrast, from the agonizing efforts of the British and French in Libya, or Russian anti-terrorism incompetence.<\/p>\n 3) There is much talk of a payback to come. But the triumphalism of unapologetically celebrating the death of bin Laden also conveys a newfound confidence, or perhaps even fatalism, a sort of\u00a0Bring it on, let\u2019s get it over with once and for all<\/em>. I think we will see that \u2018whatever\u2019 attitude with Pakistan, whose yelps about violation of its airspace will soon give way to the reality that American public opinion considers it not an ally, not even a neutral, but a veritable enemy that has done more harm to this country than Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela ever dreamed of. Should Obama wish to deal toughly with the Pakistanis, he has public support, and of course the option of much closer relations with India, in and outside of Afghanistan. The public wants the Pakistan two-step to end.<\/p>\n 4) Radical Islam has been incrementally and steadily weakened over the last decade. It has not repeated a 9\/11-like operation. There are Bush-era antiterrorism protocols in place, embraced or expanded by Obama, that make terrorism far harder. We have killed thousands of Islamists in Anbar Province and in Afghanistan. The Arab world is fragmented, in open revolt, and the Arab Street is incapable of voicing, as it once did, solidarity with bin Laden. Obama knows this better than anyone, so talks of \u2018reset\u2019 even as he keeps the Bush antiterrorism protocols unchanged. Whether the trigger for this wave of Middle Eastern unrest and rebellion was the removal of Saddam and the establishment of a democracy in Iraq, or a Soviet-like implosion of failed autocratic government throughout the Middle East, it matters little. At least for now, Middle East dictatorships\u00a0in extremis<\/em>\u00a0are claiming as their one saving grace their antiterrorism and anti-al-Qaeda credentials, and, likewise, those in the streets seeking to destroy these Middle East authoritarians are claiming just about the same. Both groups are probably lying, but their rhetoric at least is predicated on the fact that bin Laden & Co. are now losers in a way they were praised as winners between 2001 and 2003.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner I\u00a0think there will be repercussions from the hit, and most of them will turn out to be good in terms of the War on Terror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[59],"tags":[1051,161,12,293,1080,442,1048,296,160,1022],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Ox","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1939,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-dimensions-of-qaddafis-death\/","url_meta":{"origin":3133,"position":0},"title":"The Dimensions of Qaddafi’s Death","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 20, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner If Muammar Qaddafi has really been killed \u2014 a big if, since so many of the Libyan rebels\u2019 military communiques have proven premature \u2014 it raises a lot of questions, besides being very welcome news in the sense that Qaddafi has the blood of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3339,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/libya-is-not-iraq\/","url_meta":{"origin":3133,"position":1},"title":"Libya Is Not Iraq","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 18, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The Left is terribly embarrassed about the US intervention in Libya. We have preemptively attacked an Arab Muslim nation that posed little threat to the national-security interests of the United States. President Obama did not have majority support among the American people. Nor\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7422,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/benghazi-constructs\/","url_meta":{"origin":3133,"position":2},"title":"Benghazi Constructs\u00a0","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 20, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Much is still murky, but the Obama team was at the least guilty of negligence and deception.\u00a0 By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Almost everything the administration has alleged about Benghazi has proven false. Yet also, in Machiavellian fashion, the Obama group successfully peddled useful fictions, effectively deluded\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The World"","block_context":{"text":"The World","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":326,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/oh-what-a-tangled-web\/","url_meta":{"origin":3133,"position":3},"title":"Oh What a Tangled Web","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 21, 2012","format":"gallery","excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Supporters of President Obama have dubbed those who question administration statements about Libya as either partisans or conspiracy theorists, on the premise that the administration had no reason to dissimulate. But in fact, it had plenty of political reasons not to be candid,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Benghazi"","block_context":{"text":"Benghazi","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/benghazi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1298,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/two-bad-september-days\/","url_meta":{"origin":3133,"position":4},"title":"Two Bad September Days","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 27, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Two terrible September days sum up the first decade of the new American millennium. The first, of course, was Sept. 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden\u2019s suicide terrorists that morning hit the Pentagon, knocked down the World Trade Center, killed 3,000 Americans, and left\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "9\/11"","block_context":{"text":"9\/11","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war\/911\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3422,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/should-we-intervene-in-libya\/","url_meta":{"origin":3133,"position":5},"title":"Should We Intervene in Libya?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 20, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There are plenty of good arguments for imposing a no-fly zone in Libya. Without Libyan-government air strikes, the rebels might have a better chance of carving out permanent zones of resistance. 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