Barack Obama will certainly reap political benefit from the fact that Osama bin Laden is dead, but how much credit does he really deserve? We won't know until we get more details. It could be that bin Laden was located because of changes to U.S. policy that Obama ordered. Or more likely it was a combination of many people's hard work and a great deal of luck, and it would have happened about now no matter who was president.
But that's the nature of the presidency -- just as the president gets more blame than he deserves when the economy is bad and more credit than he deserves when it's good, Obama will be rewarded for having done what George W. Bush couldn't do, kill the man Bush pledged to get "dead or alive."
We may not know for a time what effect bin Laden's killing has on al-Qaeda as an organization (or a movement, or however it could be described these days). But we can at least hope that this event can help us be a little more sane about terrorism. Bin Laden's persistence has contributed to the idea that terrorists are more powerful than they actually are, that we have to be afraid all the time, that we can't try them in New York because they might use their Muslim heat vision to escape. Perhaps the next time some half-wit wannabe terrorist tries to blow up a plane with explosive hair gel, we won't all have to shave our heads before getting on a plane.
