Quote of the Day: Walter Russell Mead on Osama

The whole piece is worth a look.  Here's a snippet:

President Obama has been able to announce the news that Americans have longed to hear for the last ten years:  Osama bin Laden is dead, his corpse flung into the sea. 

Better, he is dead at America’s hands. 

Better yet, he died a beaten man.  His bid for the leadership of global Islam had failed, and Osama lived long enough to see other movements and other ideas shoulder his perverted synthesis aside.  Osama was yesterday’s man, and he knew it. 

... now the deed is done and there is no need to downplay its importance.  The death of Bin Laden will discourage and depress terrorists and their potential recruits the world over.  The world’s most ‘successful’ terrorist had nothing to show for his efforts — no forced withdrawal of the US from the Middle East, no proclamation of a caliphate, no destruction of Israel, no theocracy in Iraq. 

Bin Laden’s death is not, as Peter Beinart suggests in the Daily Beast, the end of the war on terror.  ... So to amend Beinart, we are winning this war, but it isn’t over yet. 

Nevertheless, the death of this failed, misguided man — with the blood of his thousands of victims staining his hands, choking his soul, and rising up to testify against him on the dreadful day of judgment – changes the world, and it changes the world for the better.

The word "misguided" strikes me as a touch too light.  It's too close to "mistaken," as if his twisted belief system were somehow just an error of judgment.  No, the proper words are "utterly depraved."  This bloody-minded scumbag knew exactly what he was about, and all decent people should be able to express without any guilt whatsoever our pleasure that he has been put down.  (By the way, the account of US special forces swooping out of the sky to take out this pernicious monster and then disappear back into the night is a thing that should be retold in warrior epic song as one of the most awesomely bad@$$ things I've ever heard of in modern history.)   See also this and this.