Hillary Clinton-is this why women should be in charge?

I've just listened to Hillary Clinton telling a Rome press conference that she couldn't remember what they were all looking at when this photograph was taken. Well I think that is a shame. But rather than accuse Hillary of being very forgetful or worse , lets work out what this picture does tell us.

Well, in the early statements from the White House we were told that they were watching the raid in real time and then in a later statement they were watching it from a distance. Obviously there will have been a reason for this misunderstanding but I'm going to proceed with this analysis on the basis that whatever they are looking at is in sufficient detail as to be able to hold everybody's focus and attention, apart from General Brad Webb's who appear to be engaged in some technical aspect of the situation.

We can also be clear that whatever it is they are looking at is in sufficient detail so as to be able to bring about differing emotional responses from the people who are looking at it. Most of the men who are looking at the screen, are masking and controlling their emotional response to whatever it was that they are looking at.  President Obama is carefully controlling his facial expression and emotional response to what it is that he is seeing, in a similar way that he controlled his emotional response to  the question in the 60 minute interview about having seen the picture of bin Laden's body. He might well hate what he is looking at, but he is disassociating his instinctive emotional response from the representation of his self that he projects to the world: The president is being presidential.

Some of the other men in the room would appear to be less successful at suppressing their emotional response, with one or two of them finding it difficult to stop themselves from smiling at whatever it is that they are looking at. In itself that doesn't mean anything, but these barely suppressed smiles have to be juxtaposed with Hillary Clinton's strong expression of concern, which verges on sorrow. Hillary's expression is the least contrived and controlled in the room, it is the most caring and the most compassionate. Now we all know that Hillary Clinton is as tough as they come, we know that she can manage her emotional response with the best of them, but I think that deep down Hillary Clinton is disturbed and moved by her sense of shared humanity and that whatever it is that she is seeing has moved her.

But what is less re-assuring are the responses of the others in the room, whatever it is that is arousing compassion in Hillary Clinton arouses a barely suppressed smile in some, or a form of emotional disassociation in others. Of course we cannot know exactly what it was that they were watching at this point in time, because I really don't think they will ever tell us. What we do know is that in the course of this raid, bin Laden was shot twice, his son and his wife and another a woman, all unarmed, were shot trying to protect him.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of what happened to bin Laden; the sacrifice of his wife, his child and the other woman would have been an extraordinarily difficult thing to watch. The moral certainties with which a decent human being might have viewed the demise of bin Laden, would not have sustained them in watching the end of those who were not thought guilty of terrorist crimes. Now of course according to later statements they weren't watching the raid in real time, but regardless of what it was they were watching, it aroused compassion in a very tough politician- a very tough politician who cares.       
 

Justice, bin Laden and the Arab Spring

In one way or another Osama bin Laden killed or is in someway responsible for the deaths of thousands of people and because of that widely held conviction, a few days ago President Obama ordered the arrest or killing of Osama bin Laden; and at various levels most of us think that the ordering of his arrest or death, and the subsequent execution of that order was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Well, most of us that is, who do not subscribe to Bin Laden's world view. But what about those who agree with a little of what bin Laden stood for ? Would they be so certain that the killing and disposal of bin Ladin was an act of reasonableness and an expression of justice?

I suspect not, there is a community of people in the world who are not terrorists, and who may well have had abhored what took place on 9/1,1 but who nevertheless, look at the actions of the West in its response to Islamic Terror and would struggle to see our actions as justice. They might see actions that are inevitable; in the same way that everybody knows that if you kick the shins of the biggest kid in the playground, one day, inevitably he will get you and pay you back in kind. Its not justice, but you brought it upon yourself, so you had it coming. Then there will be others who agree with the fundamental principles of Bin Laden's struggle and yet are committed to those principles as men and women of peace; perhaps they might see his death as Gods justice rather than that of men.

But the death of Osama bin Laden, should not be confused with justice; justice is defined in law and in the processes of law. Without those, there is no justice and what the Western media needs to remember, is that what they are celebrating is power and it is revenge, and whilst it seems right to you and I in the West, it will look less so to others.

Does it matter? Do we care if parts of the Muslim world think that the West wields it power, without process and justification? When people from the Muslim world look at our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and see them as an abuse of power, does it matter to us? Does it matter if we ignore the thousands of people who died as a result of our search for revenge, in the heady moments of our collective celebration of the death of Osama bin Laden.

Well it will, if the movement inspired by Mohamed Bouazzi turns out to be a false dawn; or worse, if it fails because we cared more about revenge than we did about hope.

Osama Bin Ladin - The death of a symbol?

I guess that if I'd had a relative involved in 9/11 I'd be feeling a little different now. I wouldn't have that sense of unease at the triumphalism and I might not be wondering what happens next. But there is something that has become clear today and that is: that this was all about revenge.  Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, torture, the rise of the intelligence community: Its all been about revenge for an act, allegedly and very probably instigated but not planned by Osama Bin Ladin the man who became the symbol of Islamic Terror.

And in the course of that revenge, and in the heat of its rage, the USA and its allies have brought about the deaths of a great number of people; people who were not involved in the atrocity of 9/11; people who have never carried a Kalashnikov and who probably would have preferred to have lived in the West, rather than been bombed by it. This is not a day for anything other than quiet reflection for all the victims of 9/11, those who died on the day and the ones who came after and whose blood was shed in the name of its revenge.

And as for what happens next - I'm really not sure that you can ever kill a symbol.