Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

By Niall Stanage
The Post (Ireland)
May 8, 2011

The news that America’s greatest enemy had been executed last week saw large sections of the US public celebrate wildly – but other emotions were also at work

For Colleen Kelly, the first inkling of the news came in a phone call from her father. Kelly, an Irish-American who lives in the Bronx, lost her brother, Bill Kelly Jr, in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Bill was attending a breakfast-time conference on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center when the zealots at the controls of the hijacked jets turned them toward the shimmering glass and steel of the huge skyscrapers.

Bill was 30 years old when he died. In the period after the attacks, Colleen became involved in a left-leaning group of bereaved relatives, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Mild-mannered and gentle-voiced, she is about as far from the caricature of the brash and bellicose American as it is possible to get.

Still, when the speculation her father had heard was proven correct – that Osama bin Laden, the ultimate authority behind the 9/ 11attacks, had been killed by US forces in Pakistan – Kelly was taken aback by the strength of her own response.

‘‘It was very emotional – actually surprising just how emotional the news felt,” she told The Sunday Business Post. ‘‘It was just this huge sense of relief. The other thing that was very surprising was just how close to the surface these feelings really are.”

There were many others feeling the same way. A cousin of Kelly’s called her, but spent the first few minutes sobbing down the line, unable to speak.

Asked to explain what thoughts lay behind the emotions, Kelly suggests that ‘‘at least for me, it was the relief that came from this idea that [Bin Laden] can’t hurt anybody anymore. It’s like if they were to catch a serial killer in your neighbourhood. For me, there was certainly no sense of avenging someone’s death or anything like that. I don’t believe in that idea, morally’’.

Elsewhere, other victims’ relatives were feeling a similar churn of emotions. Jack Lynch, a 75-year-old native of Tralee, lost his son, Michael, to Bin Laden’s men.

Michael, a firefighter, was the same age as Bill Kelly when he was killed. His father recalls without hesitation the day he was born – December 12,1970 – his even tone only hinting at the depth of his loss.

A relative of Lynch’s wife texted him as speculation built that the US had finally got Bin Laden.

‘‘I turned on the TV – it was about 10.30pm – and I watched the news until the president made the announcement,’’ Lynch says.

What was his reaction?

‘‘I’ll tell you now, honestly, the first thing that came into my head was: well, whatever happened, it’s not going to bring my son back. But then I thought about it some more, and I thought, really, that justice was served. I figured eventually they were going to get him. As far as I am concerned, the world is better off as a result.”

Lynch’s overall worldview is clearly more conservative than that of someone like Colleen Kelly.

He notes, for example, that ‘‘I still prefer Bush to Obama’’ – though he gives the latter credit for what he terms the ‘‘very courageous decision’’ to send in a team to terminate Bin Laden at such close quarters. Still, Lynch’s feelings about what happened have their own complexity. A religious man, he notes that, ‘‘it is very difficult for a Roman Catholic to deal with the moral issues in something like this. Any human being’s death diminishes us all – even though I think he was an evil man. But it’s God who will decide what to do with Osama bin Laden. It won’t be down to what Jack Lynch thinks or what anybody else thinks.”

Both Lynch and Kelly seem to have had some misgivings about the celebrations that followed Bin Laden’s death, and certainly neither relative comes across as remotely triumphalist about what took place. Both are also at pains to point out that they had no problem whatsoever with the actions taken by the American forces on the ground. ‘‘I have nothing but gratitude for the brave men who went into that compound,” says Kelly.

Lynch is even more pointed. ‘‘They did what they had to do,” he says, ‘‘There is a moral right to defend yourself and that’s what they were doing. He is out there to kill us. People like that have to be taken out.”

It is less than 48 hours after news of Bin Laden’s death broke, bringing a joyous crowd to the gates of the White House, their chants of ‘‘USA! USA!” ringing out .But now, in the late-afternoon sunshine, the scene at the most famous symbol of American democracy is much more mundane.

A few small knots of tourists gape through the railings. Construction workers wander around, taking breaks from their labours on the western side of the White House grounds. The TV cameras are set up and ready to shoot from their locations near the driveway, as always, but their podiums are mostly devoid of people. Only some extra crowd control barriers provide a reminder of the impromptu spectacle of last Sunday night.

Interviews conducted at random also find a greater spectrum of opinion about the manner of Bin Laden’s demise than might have been expected here. Washington, after all, is not merely the nation’s capital; it was also intimately affected by the attacks, with almost 200 people being killed just beyond its borders at the Pentagon in Virginia.

There is also a widespread assumption that the fourth hijacked plane, brought down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after an intervention by passengers, was going to be aimed at either the White House or the dome of the US Capitol.

Still, Everett Turner, a 53-year-old DC resident enjoying the weather on a park bench, his bicycle beside him, seems nonplussed by what has taken place in Pakistan.

‘‘As a Christian, I don’t believe that anybody should have to murder another human being,” he says. ‘‘We’ll never know what this man was about, because he was executed.”

Turner adds that, ‘‘I would condemn him for his actions’’ and invokes the well-known scriptural suggestion about what happens to those who live by the sword.

Some of Turner’s claims are shakily founded – he says that a trial would have enabled the world to find out ‘‘why [Bin Laden] did this thing’’, a question that the al Qaeda leader answered clearly enough in numerous messages.

But he makes, perhaps, amore persuasive case when he questions the celebrations that took place only yards from where he now sits.

‘‘To celebrate a person getting murdered? C’mon!” he says. ‘‘We’re in the middle of a recession, joblessness, and you are coming out to celebrate a man’s death? C’mon, man!”

Nancy Beach, visiting from New Hampshire with her partner, sounds a similar note of unease with some of the more macabre elements of the story.

‘‘From my point of view, when they started going into all the details of how ‘We shot this guy! We have pictures of him shot in the head!’, I just thought: is this what we have come to? Have we sunk as low as this? I didn’t think we were all about assassinations.”

Still, it would be gravely inaccurate to suggest that such dissenting views have gained traction with a wide swath of the American public. Polls taken since Bin Laden’s death was announced have indicated widespread approval of the US actions.

Near the White House gates, Tom and Nancy, tourists from eastern Iowa who decline to give their last name, are clearly among the enthusiastic backers. When asked about her reaction when she first heard the news, Nancy does not say anything, instead opening her mouth in an intentionally cartoonish image of surprise and delight.

To Tom, the killing of Bin Laden showed that ‘‘nobody can come at the United States and do that kind of thing and expect to get away with it. Mess with the bull and you’re going to get the horn’’.

Beyond the emotional reactions to Bin Laden’s death, there is also a stark question: what will change with his demise? Most intelligence assessments in recent years had tended to downplay Bin Laden’s importance to the conduct of al-Qaeda operations. Largely marginalised and confined to a furtive existence, it was assumed that the world’s most wanted man was ill-placed to actively plan further destruction.

Still, there was no doubting his significance as a figurehead. And by remaining at large, his mere existence seemed to mock the US, apparently showing the limits of its vaunted military reach.

That has clearly changed now. Barack Obama himself claimed that Bin Laden’s killing was ‘‘the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda’’.

But Obama, and others, have been clear that the fight is far from over. A New York Times editorial on the killing opined that, ‘‘even as we now breathe a bit more easily, we must also remember that the fight against extremists is far from over. Al-Qaeda may strike back or other groups may try to assert their rising power’’.

Colleen Kelly says: ‘‘I live in New York City and I have three children, and I have become very aware of the intensity of the potential threat right now. I was at a courthouse today and it was evacuated Everyone’s sensitivities are heightened.”

Other experts fear that in the years since 9/11, the American fixation on Bin Laden himself, rather than the broader ideology which he espoused, may have led US policy down the wrong tracks.

In an article on the website of the New Republic magazine last week, Lawrence Kaplan, a professor at the US’s Army War College, expressed concern that American foreign policy in recent years had come to seem to focus on ‘‘lone evil men’’ – Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bin Laden in the Afghanistan Pakistan region.

‘‘That their ideologies were soon revealed to have energized a seemingly infinite supply of suicide bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan seemed impolite to point out,’’ Kaplan wrote.

In a later phone interview with The Sunday Business Post, Kaplan says that there has long been a tendency for US policymakers to foreground ‘‘a cartoon villain, in lieu of the more difficult task of explaining American foreign policy – and that goes for Hitler and Stalin as well as much more relatively puny figures like [Somali warlord] Mohammed Aidid and Milosevic’’.

It can be much easier, he says, to sell the public on the idea of going to war to remove an individual ‘‘rather than saying, ‘We’re going to war to try to deal with this very thorny, intractable problem’.”

Among the dangers in such an approach, Kaplan says, is the temptation to declare victory prematurely. Citing the example of Saddam Hussein, he insists that, ‘‘back then, it was offered that his capture would resolve an entire war; in fact, it symbolised nothing but the beginning of the war’’.

A similar theme is sounded by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counter-terrorism expert at the Washington think-tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Gartenstein-Ross found himself in the spotlight last week after reporters picked up on his hypothesis that Bin Laden’s strategy had really been to inflict enormous economic damage on the United States, and that this gambit had actually had considerable success.

Ezra Klein, a Washington Post columnist, took an estimate of $3 trillion, made by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, as the true cost of the Iraq war, and added another $2 trillion for the Afghanistan war and another trillion for so-called homeland security measures since 9/11, to come up with a back-of-the-envelope total of $6 trillion.

While the full measure of this cost was not all expended in direct response to Bin Laden, it nonetheless came about as a con sequence of a chain of events that he initiated. Gartenstein-Ross argues that the actual dollar amount spent is less significant than the fact that ‘‘most American intelligence experts never took the time to find out what Bin Laden’s strategy actually was’’.

As a consequence, he says, ‘‘some of the [US] strategies actually played into the hands of al-Qaeda.’’ He cites the Iraq War as an example, arguing that this not only drove costs up for the US in general, but also gave extremists a bigger battlefield upon which to mount their struggle.

Both Kaplan and Gartenstein-Ross fear that another peril maybe a false sense of mission-completion following Bin Laden’s death. Kaplan told The Sunday Business Post that he became very concerned when he heard a member of Obama’s national security team say that any replacement that sprung up for Bin Laden would almost certainly be less charismatic than the slain leader – ‘‘as if al-Qaeda was bound to fall apart on the basis of an individual’s lack of charisma,” Kaplan says.

Gartenstein-Ross insists that Bin Laden’s demise should not obscure what he sees as shortcomings in the US’s counterterrorism approach.

‘‘We made a mistake after the loss of al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Afghanistan, thinking that al-Qaeda had been marginalised,” he says. ‘‘Now my fear is that we are going to proclaim it dead before it is actually dead. Let’s not declare victory before we have actually won.”

There was at least one US government agency which, if not actually declaring victory, was certainly bathing in some much needed glory last week.

The CIA’s reputation has been hit hard in recent years. The failure to prevent 9/11 may have been understandable, given the unprecedented nature of that event. More vexing, at least in many Americans’ minds, were the intelligence failures that led to wildly incorrect assumptions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities.

The CIA was further undermined in this respect by the now-infamous reports of its former director, George Tenet, informing President George W Bush that the case for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was ‘‘a slam-dunk’’.

The result of these embarrassments was that, at least up until last week, ‘‘the policymaking community’s confidence in the CIA had declined – and the CIA was losing confidence in itself,” according to David Alvarez.

Alvarez, a professor of politics at St Mary’s College of California, and a specialist in the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, says that the Bin Laden operation – involving, as it did, a long and arduous trail of diligent intelligence-gathering and a climactic daring raid – had the potential to restore the CIA’s esteem.

‘‘This shows it acting in a more competent manner than we have been led t believe has been the case in the recent past,” he says.

‘‘And it is not just that it worked in this case, but that they did the thing we wanted them to do: get Bin Laden. So what the CIA did here was not just competent but also popular.”

It was also – eventually- enormously public, which makes it something of an anomaly among successful CIA operations, as Ronald Kessler, the author of The CIA at War and another forthcoming book on the FBI, told The Sunday Business Post.

‘‘It all goes back to the CIA idea of ‘our successes are never acknowledged; our failures are.’ It really is true that often, when they have a success, it is not publicised. A lot of roll-ups of terrorist plots in the United States and around the world have actually been the result of CIA intelligence.

‘‘But this is an example of a success that can come out. The press will never say the CIA did a great job, but people recognise it.”

Kessler is not an out-and-out cheerleader for the CIA – he acknowledges that in its past it has done ‘‘some very foolish things’’, notably in its ham-fisted efforts to depose Fidel Castro. But he says that the Bin Laden operation should be seen as one of the most illustrious episodes in its history.

‘‘I would rate it as equal to the CIA’s success in discovering that Fidel Castro had missiles that the Soviets were supplying. It really is a success of the first rank,” he says David Alvarez sounds a mildly cautionary note, however. ‘‘I don’t think this will provide a refuge for the CIA in future if other operations turn out to be less successful. We have short memories here in the US. But, for now, it should accept the congratulations and praise that it deserves.”

There was another even more obvious beneficiary of last weekend’s events. Barack Obama, whose popularity had stabilised in recent months, has received a further boost from the Bin Laden operation. One new poll, jointly commissioned by the New York Times and CBS News, indicated that Obama’s overall approval rating jumped by 11 points in the past two weeks.

This is hardly the be-all and end-all. As Dr Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics says: ‘‘Obviously, there will be a bump up in the polls for Obama, maybe a major one, but those things never last very long. The presidential election is 17 months away.”

But there is a bigger story behind the poll numbers. Democrats in general, and Democratic presidents in particular, have long been vulnerable to the charge that they are weak, unassertive or otherwise untrustworthy on matters of national security. As has been often recalled in the past week, Jimmy Carter mounted an operation to rescue US hostages in Iran which went badly wrong. Bill Clinton failed to intervene to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and rapidly withdrew US troops from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down fiasco.

Up until last week, critics have often argued that Obama, whose appetite for projections of American muscularity is noticeably lesser than his immediate predecessor, was destined to become another Carter. Not any more.

‘‘A Democratic president opted against ridding the world of its most wanted terrorist by lobbing a missile from 30,000 feet above. He sent two helicopters in a daring raid with a clear mission and a plan for exit,” wrote foreign policy expert William Dobson last week. ‘‘In one fell swoop, President Obama has done more to exorcise the demons of Democratic foreign policy error and mishap than anyone in the last three decades . . .The comparison to Carter died in Pakistan along with Bin Laden.”

Democratic strategist Steve McMahon enthusiastically backs this idea when asked whether events in Pakistan immunise Obama against the traditional kinds of Republican attack. ‘‘It is better than an immunisation; it is an actual cure,” he says.

‘‘It is now very difficult for anyone to argue that that president is anything but strong on national security- and it is utterly implausible for anyone to believe it.”

McMahon also says that, as Obama ramps up his re-election effort, ‘‘this becomes part of a larger narrative: that he is somebody who focuses on a goal and works through things to achieve it. Whether that is providing healthcare, stimulating the economy, bringing down the unemployment rate or finding Osama bin Laden, he is someone who is determined and methodical in pursuit of the outcome he is seeking.”

McMahon would be expected to say these things, given his own political leanings. But even the avowedly non-partisan Sabato, though he believes the 2012 presidential election will be decided by the economy, agrees with McMahon – up to a point.

‘‘Osama’s death gives Obama one big advantage that will be tough for Republicans to counter, even in 17 months,” he says.

‘‘Any charge about defence or national security is likely to elicit a one-name answer: Bin Laden. And that is likely going to be enough to neutralise any attack on defence and national security grounds.”

Besides who’s up and who’s down, a bigger story was playing out last week. It was one in which America, as a nation, finally got the chance to begin binding up a wound.

The young people who celebrated outside the White House or in New York’s Times Square a week ago were part of a generation whose lives have been lived in the shadow of Bin Laden and the forces he unleashed – from the 9/11 attacks themselves, to a traumatised nation’s march to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the bitter debates that attended those wars, to the erosion of US civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism.

On September 11, 2001 and afterwards, Osama bin Laden had at least one kind of grim success: to a greater or lesser degree, he disfigured American life. Perhaps it was the release from that disfigurement that those who took to the streets were exultant about.

Things may never be the same as they were before the attacks. But, ten years later, America has finally vanquished a uniquely toxic enemy.

See the original article here.