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Oh yeah that guy.
May. 2nd, 2011 03:29 pmI’d pretty much forgotten about Osama Bin Laden. He wasn’t really a person or a evil mastermind or a dire threat anymore, he’d just kinda faded into history, like a popular band a decade past it’s heyday – “Really, are they still around?” Hearing the news on the drive to work this morning brought some of it back, but it’s still all muted by the years that have passed and things that have happened – new situations, new threats, new geopolitical landscapes.
My own way of looking at the world has certainly changed, mostly from reading Stratfor. If I had to sum up the first rule of thinking about geopolitics, it would be “Don’t Take It Personally.” If you want to make a reasoned analysis of world political events, you don’t have the luxury of being emotional - don’t waste your time seeking revenge or rejoicing over getting the bad guy. You have your strategic goals, and your best estimates of the costs and benefits of your actions. We could have gotten Bin Laden years ago, but how we got him had quickly become as important as if we got him. More so, actually, since we’d neutralized the threat of the core Al Quaeda organization a long time ago. Is killing Bin Laden worth another thousand US soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Is it worth killing a thousand Pakistanis? Cost and benefit. In the end, it was a ballsy move to use one platoon of SEALs, things could have gone really bad really fast. But then, we don’t do anything like this without a boatload of planning, no way we would have gone in unless we had the Pakistani government’s help in locking down the city for an hour during the raid. Helicopters are LOUD, and everybody in the neighborhood, with or without an AK or RPG, would have come running before the Blackhawks ever touched down. Elements of the Pakistani security establishment have been shielding Bin Laden for years, so something had to have changed for them to be willing to give him up. I guess Osama just wasn’t as popular anymore, people had sort of forgotten about him. I’m sure he knew his time was finally up, and when he went down, he didn’t take it personally.
My own way of looking at the world has certainly changed, mostly from reading Stratfor. If I had to sum up the first rule of thinking about geopolitics, it would be “Don’t Take It Personally.” If you want to make a reasoned analysis of world political events, you don’t have the luxury of being emotional - don’t waste your time seeking revenge or rejoicing over getting the bad guy. You have your strategic goals, and your best estimates of the costs and benefits of your actions. We could have gotten Bin Laden years ago, but how we got him had quickly become as important as if we got him. More so, actually, since we’d neutralized the threat of the core Al Quaeda organization a long time ago. Is killing Bin Laden worth another thousand US soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Is it worth killing a thousand Pakistanis? Cost and benefit. In the end, it was a ballsy move to use one platoon of SEALs, things could have gone really bad really fast. But then, we don’t do anything like this without a boatload of planning, no way we would have gone in unless we had the Pakistani government’s help in locking down the city for an hour during the raid. Helicopters are LOUD, and everybody in the neighborhood, with or without an AK or RPG, would have come running before the Blackhawks ever touched down. Elements of the Pakistani security establishment have been shielding Bin Laden for years, so something had to have changed for them to be willing to give him up. I guess Osama just wasn’t as popular anymore, people had sort of forgotten about him. I’m sure he knew his time was finally up, and when he went down, he didn’t take it personally.
