Analysis
FIRST, by their own account, they finally killed him with a marksman’s bullet to the head; later, they confirmed that the infamous al Qaeda leader was unarmed at the time of his capture.
Then the Barack Obama administration went on the defensive all last week contending that the murder of Osama bin Laden was ‘legal’. However, the photographs of his body were “too gruesome” to make public, as they could spark violent retaliations from his followers.
Nevertheless, as the Caribbean joins other regions of the world in precautionary security preparedness against likely reprisal attacks from the feared international terrorist movement, al-Qaeda, President Obama is preening with satisfaction on his road to expected victory for presidential election campaign 2012.
And why not? He has succeeded where two other Presidents of the USA—Bill Clinton and George W Bush—had failed to make a reality of their respective repeated pledges to capture—dead or alive—America’s most wanted criminal, the 54-year-old Saudi Arabian leader of al-Qaeda.
It would be recalled that during his historic bid to become the first Black-American President, Obama had not only vowed to “get rid of the terrorist monster” — as he described Osama bin Laden–but to “stamp out al-Qaeda once and for all…”
Well, he stunningly succeeded in getting rid of bin Laden—much to the relief of not only the people of the USA who had been so deeply wounded and humiliated by the unprecedented terrorist strikes on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, but nations across the global community—rich and powerful; small and poor.

Challenging boast

However, his challenging boast to “stamp out al-Qaeda once and for all” may prove too daunting a challenge for success, and time will be the judge. For now, as Obama’s political victory in the demise of the al-Qaeda leader creates major problems for the Republicans and so-called ‘Tea Party’ opponents who want to see his back, he seems, even at this early stage of  election campaign 2012, heading to prove wrong all who have put him down as a one-term President.
Be that as it may, it is useful for nations like ours in the Caribbean to also bear in mind that brilliant political leader he has proven to be, Obama would be aware that in hunting down bin Laden and going after the ‘Taliban’ fighters in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the USA and its allies have also killed very many innocent civilians, among them women and children.
We can no more allow hatred, or cries for vengeance against Osama bin Laden and his terrorist networks to rationalize the killings — in some cases outright assassinations — by the USA and its NATO allies of non-combat civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya — or else, and at the same time weep and demonstrate outrage when civilians in other nations and of differing ethnicities are routinely murdered in determined battles in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘the rule of law’.
Sadly, such displays of double-speak, of sheer political hypocrisy, have often come under the rubric of the United Nations Security Council. Do not expect the USA or any of its NATO allies to concur, but the recent UN ‘no-fly zone’ resolution on Libya, ostensibly to “protect civilians”  is the latest example.

Rule of Law

Just this past Wednesday in its editorial on ‘Reflections on the killing of bin Laden’, the Barbados ‘Daily Nation’ made quite a relevant observation:
“The security of any nation,” it said, “superpower or other, is best guaranteed when those controlling the levers of state power avoid engaging in expedient enforcement of the rule of law, or selectively make a farce of democratic governance and sovereignty of states and fundamental rights of citizens….
“This is perhaps a good time,” the editorial concluded, “for the powerful, as well as the vulnerable and poor, to bear this in mind, amid the current many bloody conflicts being waged in so many regions of the world.”
Meanwhile, as Obama’s domestic opponents are struggling against the flood of praise for his success in ‘delivering’ the certified body of Osama bin Laden that was buried at sea on Sunday, according to established Islamic traditions, the United Nations was frantically removing, that same day, its international staff from Tripoli, following the damage and, in some cases major destruction, to foreign diplomatic missions by angry supporters of President Muammar Gaddafi.
That development was in response to the bombing strikes by NATO directly targeting the office and residential compound of Colonel Gaddafi, killing in the process his youngest son and three grandchildren.
“A clear attempt to assassinate our leader,” declared an official Libyan spokesman to the international media. Not so, said NATO, contending that its bombing strikes had “targeted a command and control building,” and that all its “targets were military in nature…”
What a pathetic political response after an earlier bombing expedition on Gaddafi’s huge compound from which the Libyan leader had also survived, though some civilians were not so fortunate.
By then, Russia and China, as well as the African Union and the Arab League, were openly denouncing the bombings and urging an “immediate ceasefire.”  It would have been particularly painful for the Arab League to also embrace such a call, having earlier provided the fig leaf of “regional support,” as sought by the USA, Britain and France, for the UN’s ‘no fly zone’ resolution.
The question now is whether, with his amazing success in taking out Osama bin Laden, President Obama will have more time to reassess the continuing bombing raids on Libya in an evidently designed plan for ‘regime change’ in Tripoli. Or do we have to wait until the US-led NATO war against the Gaddafi regime succeed in physically removing the Libyan leader –dead or alive?
Towards weekend, as the debate over the ‘legality’ of the killing of bin Laden intensified in the USA, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR),  Navi Pillay, said she would be formally requesting “a full disclosure of the accurate facts…” of the circumstances of the al Qaeda leader’s death.
For its part, the International Criminal Court (ICC) , of which the USA is still not a member, was disclosing its plan to file arrest warrants against Libyan leaders, possibly including President Muammar Gaddafi himself, for alleged war crimes in the ongoing civil war in that North African state.
We must now await developments to see if such “arrest warrants” from the ICC, which was established in 2002, will also include ‘leaders’ of the armed anti-Gaddafi movement. They are currently being openly supported by the US-led NATO bombing raids on Libya, the latest of whose strikes on the Libyan President’s office and residential complex have killed, among others, his youngest son.