Obama's Osama moment: A time for closure and confusion

The front page of Salon.com was telling. There’s a picture of Osama bin Laden, a much younger bin Laden, his beard still mostly black. [caption id=“attachment_3529” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden is seen aiming a weapon in this undated photo from Al-Jazeera TV. Al-Jazeera/Getty Images”]  [/caption] Under it a simple headline – He’s dead. The sub-head reads Obama announces that US troops killed the Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan on Sunday. The name Osama bin Laden is nowhere on the  front page.  Perhaps it’s because he’s one of the most famous faces in the world. Perhaps it is the terror that cannot be named.  More likely some copy editor cringed at putting Osama and Obama in the same headline. But watching President Obama deliver the news to his nation, I was struck by both how momentous it was and how anti-climactic it felt, even nostalgic. The President was almost lyrical in his evocation of 9/11 as if summoning up old ghosts, talking of a “bright” September day “darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history.” He talked about “the empty seat at the dinner table,” “parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace.” It is as if he was reminding his country, almost 10 years after 9/11, that it had really happened, that the bogeyman was still out there in the mountains, taunting Americans with his old-fashioned audio cassette tapes, eluding the hi-tech spycraft of the CIA. On September 20, 2001, President Bush had addressed a shell-shocked joint session of Congress. It’s revealing to go back to that speech and compare it with Obama’s address to the nation. In some ways it shows how ten years later, America has not moved. Both talked about how Americans, Republicans and Democrats, came together in a moment of crisis. Bush expressed thanks and gratitude for he was its beneficiary. Obama, who is at the center of so much bitter partisan division, sounded wistful about it. “On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family,” he told his countrymen. Both expressed their astonishment at the attacks. It was about America’s innocence shattered by what Bush called “surprise attacks” on “a peaceful morning.” He mentioned nothing about the warnings he had received, the CIA briefings about bin Laden he had ignored. Obama said “The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores.” Both took pains to stress this was not a fight against Islam. “I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam,” said Obama. He went further than Bush calling bin Laden not a Muslim leader, but a “mass murderer of Muslims.” And while both put bin Laden at the top of their most wanted list, the symbol of terror, both said the fight was bigger. And that’s where the stories finally diverge. Bush used that speech to launch his war on terror. Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. Obama made no mention of that war any more. He talked about the far more prosaic, far less headline-grabbing task of “securing our country.” Perhaps that is the difference between the smoke-them-out-of-their-caves Cowboy President and his let’s-not-appear-too-triumphant professorial successor. But the eerie similarities between the two speeches underscore how America has never really recovered from 9/11. Obama was signaling the end of the unfinished business of 9/11 not the culmination of today’s geo-political struggles. As Nicholas Kristof says in his blog about the speech: His death won’t inspire people, the way it might have in 2002. And Al Qaeda is already going through a difficult time because it has been sidelined by the Arab Spring protests. Obama knows that. He knows the world has moved on and changed even in that small part of the world where bin Laden was hiding. Bush only mentioned Pakistan once in his entire speech and that was in the context of Pakistanis killed in the Twin Towers attack. He mentioned Afghanistan seven times. In Obama’s speech that was reversed – nine references to Pakistan, only two to Afghanistan. But really the speech was the last elegy for 9/11. Joan Walsh, editor at large of Salon.com realizes that. Even as I write this piece the front page of Salon.com has changed. There’s another picture of Osama – a grayer one. And the headline reads Is this what closure feels like?