Post Osama: Less Fear-Mongering, Please

By Patricia Lee Sharpe 

Osama bin Laden is dead.  He was tracked down and killed.  The hunt took ten long years.  But the U.S. got its man, and that is important: you cannot launch gratuitous acts of terrorism against Americans with impunity.  I see some some deterrent power here as well as a little burnishing of the U.S. image.  No respectable, rational voice has ever suggested that the U.S. lacked justification to bring bin Laden “to justice.”

Yes, there are still plenty of terrorism-inclined individuals and sects out there.  Yes, there may be strident attempts to avenge bin Laden’s death, some well thought out, some clumsy. More important, however, is the fact that the ideological war within Islam remains unresolved.  In the near and medium term,  many more Muslims will die before it is resolved. 

Probably more Muslims than Westerners.

In this regard, it behooves Americans  to extricate the U.S.  from the intra-Muslim struggle, except perhaps in situations where minorities face the possibility of holocaust-like ethnic cleansing.  This will be very frustrating.  The impulse to choose sides between varieties of Islam that are more attractive to us and those that are less so will often be very strong.  But it needs to be resisted.  Naturally, when extremists plot to carry out terrorist acts or actually succeed in doing so, they lay themselves open to the course of events that finally caught up with bin Laden.  

Perhaps, however, we can take some comfort in the fact that many things have changed in the Muslim world since 9/11.  A recent Pew study shows that bin Laden’s approval ratings have continued to plunge among young people in most Muslim countries; whether the residual positives are consistent with the percentage of salafist-type practitioners in a given country I don’t know.  And a disenchantment with bin Laden doesn’t necessarily equate with lessened support for his bed fellows. 

However, we have learned something important during these months of upheaval throughout the Arab world: a great number of young people have no affinity for fundamentalism or terrorism—as is the case with many of the youth in Iran.

Whether there’s been a drift from fundamentalism to some sort of modernism among the young, or whether youthful moderation has simply been invisible during these long years when populations have been cowed by authoritarian rule is hard to tell.  But it does suggest that those who are preaching fear, fear, fear in the aftermath of bin Laden’s demise should not be allowed to monopolize our attention.  Sure, there are plenty of Osama clones out there.  But how about the many more thousands who have publically repudiated that path to the future?


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