Bin Laden's demise not a cause for celebration

These things seem to follow a pattern now, don't they? Every major news event in the world seems to be presented to us as part of a template, both inside and outside the media itself. Broadly, it runs something like: media frenzy in the first couple of days, in this case swamping even the royal wedding, generally accompanied by the first jokes to be circulated around the world in a matter of hours. Then comes the endless round of repeats of the same footage, the same questions, the same information, analysis and speculation from a media that clearly feels it has to extract every drop, out of a story which drops in their laps as this one does, while they can.

Then, of course, come conspiracy theories. He's not dead really - they've got him in a cell somewhere. He's been dead for years. He's actually in the employ of the US as a handy bogeyman to pin their anti-terror efforts against. He's got sick of it, approached the US with an agreement to stop his terrorism and disappear forever if they 'appear' to have killed him. All bollocks, I suspect - what possible motive would the US have to announce anything other than that they'd killed him, if they've done so? Quite apart from anything else it will quench the US public's apparent thirst for justice (revenge?) for the supposed brains behind the 9/11 atrocity.

The slaking of that thirst, however powerful it was, has manifested itself in Americans celebrating at Ground Zero and the White House. While I completely understand that there must have been a powerful desire to get this man, this leaves a slightly unpleasant taste in the mouth. It has horrible echoes of the scenes of some people in some anti-American parts of the Arabic world celebrating the Twin Towers deaths, which quite rightly outraged and appalled people around the world, America in particular. The outrage which greeted those scenes will not be repeated here of course, but it's still people celebrating the deaths of strangers to them. It may be an odd thing to focus on, given the years, resources and lives spent hunting this man, and what his organisation has done all over the world, but for me it's a most interesting human element of the whole story.

Relief that he's gone? Yes. A sense of justification, vindication, even vengeance? Yes. Fair enough, particularly in New York perhaps. But celebration? It just doesn't seem right to me. And what's going to happen now, what further killing, what further atrocities will be committed in the name of vengeance for his death? Another turn of this macabre wheel, another list of innocent names read out perhaps. A cause for celebration it most certainly isn't.