Huh... How About That...

They got him. Seal Team Six got Osama bin Laden. In Pakistan, natch; anybody who thought he was hiding anywhere else was either ignorant or foolish.
   It's a moral victory, sure, getting the guy who claimed credit for killing thousands of New Yorkers and four planes full of innocents. Like when the Italian women finally got pissed off enough to string up Mussolini. The world is rid of one of the faces of evil and intolerance, at least as far as we in the West are concerned. The fact that for years bin Laden had been a marginal influence in Al Qaeda's daily operations is beside the point. He was the face of terror and we got him. Finally.
   And yet...
   You have to ask what made this man the way he was? He was from a very wealthy family in a very, very wealthy nation. He had it good. Real good. Better than 99.999% of the rest of the world. But he felt the need to give up his family ties - and eventually his Saudi citizenship was revoked - in order to fight what he saw as the evils of American hegemony. The bin Laden family remains huge in construction in the Middle East, their name is all over big buildings and public works projects. That Osama would give up the bin Laden empire for his fanatical beliefs is like Donald Trump deciding that he was all turned around on his self-aggrandizement and money-grubbing and that it would be better to work for the overthrow of the French government or something.
   Why? What drove this man to become the international pariah that he died as? Why did he so completely hate the United States that he felt becoming a terrorist financier was the only option left to him? Osama bin Laden's evil didn't just appear out of nowhere, it was fostered, his hatred was nurtured and constructed and built into the sinister corruption that it became. Al Qaeda's agenda was purely destructive, they weren't about bringing democracy to the people or giving a voice to the voiceless. Al Qaeda was all about destroying the West and everything it stood for, or at least what Osama bin Laden thought it stood for. I'm pretty sure we Westerners had at least a small part in helping form his negative agenda.
   We need to figure that part out, our responsibility - however small or large - in making that terrorist the horrible person he was. And we have to fix anything that's wrong, otherwise there are a couple of million really smart guys like him just waiting to take his place.