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" I have always wondered what Osama Bin Laden felt when the Twin Towers turned into pillars of dust. According to the prevailing narrative \u2014 according to our president \u2014 he was nothing more than a mass murderer, and so what he should have felt was excitement as his bloodlust was brought to consummation. My guess is that he didn&amp;#039;t. My guess is that what he felt was awe that his prayers had been answered. My guess is that he felt blessed, that he felt chosen, that he felt holy, that he felt rewarded by Allah for doing Allah&amp;#039;s work. With box-cutters and a band of sociopaths and stooges, he had attacked the most powerful country in the world at the focal points of its power, and he had succeeded beyond his wildest imagining. There is no doubt that he was a murderer down to his heart and soul, and that murder itself provided him all the justification he needed for murdering. But I am sure that on September 11, 2001, bin Laden believed that he had seen murder turn to miracle, and that his primary emotion was religious. Now he is dead \u2014 assassinated; executed; killed; murdered \u2014 and it is our turn to look to the heavens when the bloodstains are still on the ground. It is our turn to invoke God&amp;#039;s imprimatur for an order that our leaders wrote in human hands, our turn to construe the successful shedding of blood as evidence that God is kindly disposed to our cause. In his appropriately solemn speech to the nation on Sunday night, President Obama assured us not only that bin Laden had been killed, but that his killing proved America&amp;#039;s worth \u2014 that his killing &amp;quot;is a testament to the greatness of our country,&amp;quot; and that &amp;quot;we can do these things not because of our wealth and power but because of who we are.&amp;quot; He ended his speech as presidents always do on these occasions \u2014 by imploring God to bless America in a way that clearly expressed the conviction that He already had. Now, I am not about to ask for any kind of posthumous clemency for Osama bin Laden. He was our enemy, and he deserved to die. I can also understand the demonstrations of profane joy that resulted from the announcement of his death, mostly on the part of a generation that can&amp;#039;t remember life outside his baleful shadow. But I am of the belief that the worst of the human animal is not the part that kills, but rather the part serene in the belief that God has blessed the killing. We are a bloody race, we humans, and we are lying to ourselves if we think that the good Americans demanding to see the photograph of Osama bin Laden with a hole in his eye are so far removed from the good Englishmen who demanded that Oliver Cromwell be exhumed from his grave and his head set on a pike. We are also lying to ourselves if we don&amp;#039;t think that our habits of self-deception don&amp;#039;t leave us open to all manner of deceit. We have already believed the reassuring falsehood that bin Laden was killed offering armed resistance when in fact we executed an unarmed man. We will no doubt believe many more.  But it&amp;#039;s easy to construe the killing of Osama bin Laden as something other than what it is, given the horrors he perpetrated and the expense of time and blood required to accomplish his assassination. His killing had become an American grail, and quests for grails, holy or otherwise, are always open to romantic interpretation. A more reliable indicator of who we are \u2014 and what we are doing in war after war after war \u2014 were the killings that took place just two days before, in Tripoli. There were no presidential speeches about these killings, for their justification was much less clear-cut, and death accomplished from the air is much less stirring \u2014 and much more routine \u2014 than death accomplished by daring midnight raid. Indeed, last week&amp;#039;s bombing of Muammar Qaddafi&amp;#039;s compound was eerily reminiscent of the bombings that occurred in Tripoli twenty-five years ago at the behest of Ronald Reagan. Back then, the bombings were in retribution for a Libyan-planned terrorist bombing in Berlin, and wound up missing Qaddafi but killing his adopted daughter; this time, the bombings were part of an ongoing NATO assault on a tyrant who had killed his own people, and wound up killing his youngest son and three of his grandchildren. But lest we forget: What the 1986 bombings yielded was not any kind of surcease from terrorism but rather Qaddafi&amp;#039;s killing of 270 people on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, two years later. The United States was relatively innocent back then. We couldn&amp;#039;t even have imagined a &amp;quot;pure&amp;quot; terrorist like Osama bin Laden freed from the constraints of statehood, or even discernible political aims. But it didn&amp;#039;t take an Osama bin Laden to set us on the course we remain on even now. It took two men, Reagan and Qaddafi, matching blood-for-blood.  But that was always bin Laden&amp;#039;s purpose anyway, and his point. From the start, he set his sights on American exceptionalism \u2014 the idea that we, as a people, are both innocent of the causes and immune from the consequences of history. He sought to replace our innocence with our entanglement, and in this he succeeded even on the day he died. Two years ago, the American people looked to Barack Obama to disentangle us from the knots that Osama bin Laden tied us in, and to restore to our sense of being blessed. But Obama has been willing to match blood-for-blood from the start, and has surprised his American friends and confounded his American foes by being more lethal abroad than he has been inspiring at home. Now he has found his greatest triumph in the killing of our enemy, and though for Sean Hannity and other hairdo heroes even that is not enough \u2014 they want to see pictures! \u2014 he has probably done enough to win himself another term. We humans are a bloody race, after all, and we Americans are a bloody people, and Barack Obama has turned out to be one of us after all, right down to his insistence that God&amp;#039;s grace is what explains our wealth and power.  But let&amp;#039;s not forget that our wealth and power are what killed Osama bin Laden. God had nothing to do with it.  UPDATE: Junod on Obama, Osama, and Fox News &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; EARLIER: THOMAS P.M. BARNETT ON THE GLOBAL FALLOUT AND BIN LADEN&amp;#039;S FINAL INTERVIEW WITH AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; PLUS: CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE ON BIN LADEN&amp;#039;S DEATH "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a9853/bin-laden-blood-5681415/>