The Spectactor's Notes

The Americans committed an extra-judicial killing this week, violating the sovereign territory of a friendly power, and reaching bin Laden’s lair because of information obtained outside legal process at Guantanamo Bay. And a good thing too, in the circumstances. But it is fascinating how little protest there has been from the people who are usually noisiest about any infringements of international law, and of human rights as currently interpreted. This must be because the perpetrator is Barack Obama. He has behaved exactly as George W. Bush would have done — ruthlessly, violently and unilaterally — but without the odium from the BBC, Channel 4, the Liberal Democrats etc etc which Mr Bush would have attracted. There was a theory, shorthanded as ‘Nixon Goes To China’, that only the right could do a deal with the communist world. There should now be an equivalent, called ‘Obama Goes To Abbottabad’, for how only the left can kill terrorists.

As one gets older, one reviews the course of one’s life. I am exactly the same age as Osama bin Laden, so his death provokes reflection. Anyone with any streak of egotism must feel slightly envious of bin Laden’s great fame and mage-like mystique, but on the whole I am grateful not to have had his career. Many of us pseudo-intellectuals, when young, have dreadful ideas about violently improving the world, but in a decent university education, these urges are channelled harmlessly. Bin Laden had the misfortune to attend King Abdel Aziz University in Jeddah and to fall under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood and the teaching of Abdullah Azzam, a jihadist theologian. The rest is bloody history.