On the face of it, that seems a silly question. Osama is dead. American forces found him, stalked him, and killed him at his porn-laden luxo-base far from any front line. That hardly seems like a win by anyone's definition. And yet...
Campylobacter is one of the most common causes of food-born illness in the world. The bacteria can be carried by domesticated animals, it can be carried by birds, it can even be carried by kangaroos and wombats. When droppings from these animals get into contact with food and the bacteria get ingested, it can lead to some very unpleasant results. For the next 24-48 hours there can be shakes, nausea, chills -- all the deep, deep misery that we associate with a case of food poisoning. The only good thing about Campylobacter is that the symptoms they bring are generally short-lived and only very rarely fatal.
However, for one case in a hundred thousand, the intestinal misery isn't the end. Within a few days or weeks after this illness, the victim begins to feel a certain tingly numbness in the feet. Quickly this feeling spreads upwards. With a space of hours, it covers the legs, leaving them numb, rubbery and weak. It spreads to the body, forcing the victim to struggle for each breath. Arms weaken. Hands tremble. It spreads to the face, slackening the sufferer's expression, making it nearly impossible for them to describe their horror as they lose control over their jaws and tongue, as their head lolls, and as their eyes drift uncontrollably in their sockets.
Acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy isn't caused by Campylobacter. It's caused by the victim's own immune system. Somehow the relatively minor infection by the disease, triggers a connection in which the immune system begins to attack compounds found in the sheaths along human nerves. As in many autoimmune diseases, it's not the attack from an external vector that brought the worst damage, it's the response of the same systems that fought off and destroyed the invader. Long after the bacteria is excised from the body, the damage lingers.
What happened to the United States on 9/11 was no simple thing. It was an enormous tragedy that played out over several states and touched millions of lives. The impact was deep, immediate, and painful. It was an acute infection of horror.
What happened in the wake of 9/11 was something altogether different. In the end, it's what came after that is the biggest cause of prolonged suffering.
As awful as 9/11 was, it was not a threat to our survival as a nation, not a threat to our ability to project American power around the world, not a threat to our economy, not a threat to our freedoms. However, our response to 9/11 endangered all those things. It still does. Like an immune system eating itself from the feet up, we've surrendered thousands of lives, expended trillions of dollars both at home and abroad, abandoned friends, embraced enemies, and tolerated previously intolerable insults to privacy.
Our reaction to terrorism isn't unique. Similar overactive immune responses of government are present at several levels. For example, preventing violence and maintaining order definitely have benefits, but in the name of getting "tough on crime", we've escalated our response until we've come close to bankrupting many states and put a significant portion of the population behind bars. At the same time we've created a pervasive, violent criminal class and eliminated programs of remediation that had actually proven to be effective. Intent on punishment, we forgot the purpose of the whole system.
On another front, promoting market-based competition has benefits, but turning competition into a Rand/Gecko mantra of greed Über Alles, creates a set of lawless, self-destructive institutions that are much less effective than even the most tightly regulated markets. Fixated on getting government out of the way of markets, we forgot that markets can't exist without governance.
It's hardly a coincidence that both of these issues have largely been driven by the right. The whole "if a little is good, then more must be better" theory that is practically the formula for modern conservatism on any subject from tax cuts to school vouchers is an constant invitation to find ways to destroy our own system; a recipe for guaranteed overreaction. It's a prerequisite of any Republican presidential candidate -- don't have a reasonable response to any issue, always, always, always go overboard. Following this scheme leads to an inward facing fit of auto-cannibalism. To an acute disorder known as Conservatitus.
In the case of 9/11, that original infection in which bin Laden played the role of disease vector called for a measured, appropriate response. Instead we got the War in Iraq, the Patriot Act, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, CIA "black" facilities, and a government dedicated to the defense of torture. We got a foreign policy where the most nuanced distinction is between delivery of violence in person, or delivery of violence by remote control. We got a system that thinks publicly stripping a dying grandmother out of her adult diaper is a reasonable price for safety. We got an America unwilling to spend a dime more on the education of our own children, while robotic bombs that cost more than whole school districts are almost daily expended attempting to kill people whose roles we don't understand, whose names we often don't know, and whose threat is unguessable. We got chaos.
It wasn't bin Laden who did this. He could never do this. It's our response to bin Laden. That's what has already crippled us, and what may yet kill us.
But maybe we won't go there. Maybe we'll stop before we wreck ourselves. After all, most of the victims of AIPD recover... after weeks of suffering, hard work and therapy. They learn to talk again and to feed themselves with shaking hands. They drag themselves onto weakened legs and walk until their strength returns. Maybe we'll do the same. This is the week in which we celebrate our independence. Maybe we can pause between the fireworks to dedicate ourselves to recovery.
Or maybe we'll continue to tear our selves apart, to trade real freedoms for the illusion of safety, to destroy real lives for the ghost of justice, to expend our waning wealth on causes and courses we don't understand. Maybe Republicans will continue to use fear as a means of justifying anything, and Democrats will continue to let the fear of looking weak inspire true weakness.
While we're at it, we might as well drop ship bin Laden a crate of doe-eyed virgins along with a note of congratulations. After all, we're doing far more damage to ourselves than he and every other terrorist on the planet could do to us in the struggle of a million years.