A Postscript to U.S. Foreign Policy

Greetings, these are my thoughts on a World without Ossama Bin-Laden

Ten years of hide and seek have culminated as the worst case of media diatribe-- now in some circles, there seems to be a sense of closure regarding in the incidents which reached critical mass on September 11th over a decade ago. One has to admit, that even if you lost a loved one either as a hero or a victim, the way in which the events were handled by the media could at times border on the sensational. Geraldo Rivera banned from the Middle East, another reporter returning home severely injured (without a medal of honor) for exposé style news coverage. Generals jet-setting to Paris for a round of drinks with the boys, replete with a handy Rolling Stone page eager to record his every breathe. These are but a few of the images that have made the front page of the morning edition and some of the news that has reached your cell phone's screen.

As one who has a healthy appetite for media, I do not bathe in the satire shows on FOX and I will not sit starry-eyed looking at the the Sunday morning news line-up. However, I may have to say that life after Ossama is not be as bad as people think and it may lead us to believe that the sky is not falling. The War on Terror in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are dramatic, an extreme ode to American brawn as well as a lesson in futility. Democracy however tender and tenuous in the United States is still a commodity that cannot be sold or implemented abroad with the vigor that previous administrations believed possible.  Quite frankly we'd require Muckety version 5.0 to make sense of the Middle East as a region. Have we won? What did we accomplish? First there were WMD's and then a salacious confrontation with Hans Blick, that blended into conversations of Taliban, al-Qa'ida and a general campaign on Terror.

The reality is that life after Bin Laden is as much about America as it is about the global politics. America has placed itself in the precarious position of being a global leader and policeman. Needless to say, what does that mean to the children of the World, those that were teens and grade-schoolers during the horrific events in New York City? These children have lived in lock step with a one-sided reality that cannot be seen as entirely true. Furthermore, there are children on the other side of the globe that have grown up under Ossma's tutelage and under the perception that all Americans are evil and that they travel with a sense of entitlement.

Many of these children on both sides signed up in eager anticipation to fight a war that could have been quelled with some sort of UN intervention and diplomacy. Those children of 9/11 are now young adults and some have fought for justice others have lost friends in combat as result of poor policy implementation and the inability to change the "news" that has been placed on their laptops, pda's, radios, and television sets. In short, America was able to decapitate the al-Qa'ida Network with a small team of highly trained soldiers and could have probably done so a half decade earlier.

"The policy and sentiment were in ~place but the conundrum then becomes, how does a teacher of democracy become a policeman and how can a policeman teach a principled curriculum?"

On the world stage, we may have allowed too much time to pass and we have lost a grasp on the real issues at hand. Militarily any act of aggression on American soil should be dealt with swiftly (the policeman) and sans a syllabus (the teacher). Additionally, the American government may have indirectly bred a new generation of al-Qa'ida enthusiasts those who've grown up hearing taped lectures and speeches by Ossama and whose perceptions of liberty are shaped by the events in between 9/11 and his death.

The geography of Liberty has been changed as a result of 9/11. What needs to be done now is to assure the generations of the future that the teacher of diplomacy is right and that the policeman need not come to the classroom or the marketplace. This can be achieved in the region only if concerted efforts at Middle Eastern economic growth and Pan-Asian stability are met with actionable plans and if they are discussed openly on the world stage. The Suez Canal talks are but a chintzy offering.

Ossma's passing is a marker in history without question. How he is dealt with in a historical context is another matter altogether. All we can hope is that the word war is further developed into an acronym and that that acronym is "Wisdom And Reason."

+JO.