Enjoy the Moment

Twitter jokes about bin Laden's death.

My favorite? "RIP Osama bin Laden, World Hide and Go Seek Champion (2001-2011)"

Laugh, and then continue the mission. The idea that some want to peddle that the war is over and we can come home is so stupid that it is hard to believe that anyone with a working brain stem and two or three brain cells to rub together could make it.

Oh sure, they can dress it up with the idea that the simplistic notion that we face a single jihadi enemy ideology fails to understand the nuance of the divisions within the jihadi world, which means that we are foolish to think we are fighting a unified enemy. But this is false knowledge if we try to believe that those divisions mean our enemies don't have a common enemy--America--that overrides their divisions. Exploiting those divisions is a tactical matter and not a strategic factor that nullifies the factions as our collective enemy. Even though these pundits peddle the soothing notion that we can continue to wage this not-war quietly and with intelligence and police work without thinking of it as a war, our enemies sure think of it as a war. And they will continue to wage it. Just because we might say it is over doesn't make it over.

By this faux nuanced thinking of our reality-based community we can pretend to return to normal and turn inward to fixate on shark summers and celebrity gossip and even midnight basketball programs, or whatnot. But it is a fantasy world that only appears to exist until the moment our enemy hits us at home again big and makes the idiotic notion that we are too focused on jihadi enemies once again clear to us.

Killing Osama bin Laden and dumping his carcass in the ocean was a necessary task (and one done with such good timing to take place during the Arab Spring's rejection of Islamism which reduces the image of martyrdom after his death that I wonder--if only just a little, mind you--if this was more than just good luck on the timing) but it is not the war.

We are still at war. Don't become confused on this point. We can enjoy this moment. But it is just a moment.

UPDATE: Speaking of people without a working brain stem or with fewer than a three brain cells to rub together, Barney Frank and his ilk want to declare mission accomplished and come home. Idiots.