World - Going Cold on Bin Laden

Going Cold on Bin Laden
Ta-Nehisi Coates

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Steve Coll deftly analyzes how Osama bin Laden minted the concept of Terrorism 2.0, using media and grand spectacle to prosecute a war on the West. But the most damning portion of the article concerns a son of bin Laden who'd fallen out with his father and taken a different path:

"Omar bin Laden, a younger son of Osama, left his father in Afghanistan in 1999 and later co-wrote a memoir with his mother, Najwa, a cousin whom Osama had married when he was seventeen and she was fifteen. In the book, Omar wrote that he had lost faith in his father as a young adult in war-ravaged Afghanistan when Osama suggested that he had his brothers consider taking up suicide bombing in the Taliban's cause. The boys demurred; Omar never got over the request. 'My father,' he wrote 'hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.'"

I write a lot about the problem of stripping humanity, of "othering," and of making monsters of men. My favorite book on al-Qaeda is Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower," largely because it refused to look at al-Qaeda as the product of alien "others." Instead, Wright chronicles all of the group's evil acts, details American complicity in the group's origins, and does it so well that you feel yourself in the head of the terrorist. It's a terrifying moment: All at once, you are able to condemn the evil and see how you might become the prosecutor of such evil.

And yet now, in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, having considered his shocking record of mass murder, I find myself conjuring monsters, rejecting the mask, and virtually unable to consider bin Laden as part of the human family.

There's been a lively debate going on across the Internet about the legality of killing bin Laden, in terms of both American and international law. The weight of the debate comes not simply from bin Laden's death, but from the broader context of post-9/11 America. In a time when we are willing to countenance the legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay and the assassination of American citizens (see Anwar al-Awlaki), a debate over the legality and means by which bin Laden was killed is necessary, intelligent and important.

And I do not care.

I came to New York two months before 9/11 and thus have spent much of my time here in the shadow that tragedy. But when I think about bin Laden, I don't think about his crimes against those of us stateside. I think about him murdering innocent Kenyans simply to get attention. I think about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, beheading a human being and sending video of the atrocity out to the world. I think about the hundreds of people killed in sectarian violence after the 2006 bombing of the al-Askari Mosque, an act apparently intended to foment a civil war among the Muslims of Iraq.

Osama bin Laden, in the main, was not a killer of Americans, he was a killer of people who spanned the great breadth of the human family.

And he would have sent his own son to certain death to kill more innocent people. Reading Coll's story, all I could think was, "What kind of human would tell his own son to give his life for the murder of innocents?" The fact is that bin Laden is not the first man who's hated "his enemies more than he loved his sons." But that quote put it all in stark relief for me.

One of my motivating beliefs is that people are people, and that tags like "madman," "evil" and even "terrorist" are, very often, escape hatches which allow us to avoid the hard work of understanding the evil encoded in all of us. Often I argue that Civil War-era slaveholders and Confederates must be seen as humans. And yet when I think about bin Laden's killing, I feel no need to relate. I feel no need to qualify.

I think this is dangerous. I think it is scary when your principles become alleged and incidental, when you lose interest in the debate. It is so very dangerous to make exceptions. It is so very dangerous to go cold.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer and senior editor for The Atlantic and its website.