The simple answer to this question is no, we are no safer.
The simple answer to this question is no, we are no safer. It has been over a year since the US military took out, shot dead, however you want to phrase it, one of the most wanted men in the last hundred years. A man who is responsible for more than three thousand people’s deaths. A man who has been labeled both saviour and Satan, whose actions have divided an already split world and drove it even further apart. A man it is impossible not to have a strong opinion on.
One would think that his death would have brought closure, and release. But sadly this is not the case. The world has moved on, past 9/11 and watched as the US ploughed unthinkingly into two illegal wars – as well as introduced us to the war on terror – an unspecified, unknown threat that could be leveled against any nation that didn’t hold with US policy. And Britain followed happily along on their coattails. We watch too, as people still commit murder in the name of religion – be it Christianity, Islam or Zionism – the Western world is almost incapable of acting when the horrors that religion keeps bringing back to our door, instead it seems we rush into vile politics, embracing far right groups whose solutions offer us no salvation.
Perhaps if Bin Laden had been caught ten years ago – caught and tried in The Hague, justice would have been served for the men, women and children he was involved in killing. If this had happened we would perhaps be in a safer world on a purely logistical level, yet the amount of bloodshed that has been spilt in catching him should horrify us. Is killing one man really worth the lives of an estimated 175,000 people in Iraq alone. Surely nothing is worth that high rate of causalities?
The world isn’t safer, partly because of him and his breed of insanity, and partly because of the rights we have dropped by the wayside to catch him. We have been raised on the dialogue of freedom of speech, democracy and the ideals of a fair trial – a noble right passed down to us from the Greeks – by shooting Bin Laden by sacrificing right for expediency, we in the West, have made our world all the more dangerous.
