By Chandrashekar (Chandra) Tamirisa, (On Twitter) @c_tamirisa

It takes much time to kill a tree,

Not a simple jab of the knife

Will do it.

…

The root is to be pulled out

Out of the anchoring earth;

It is to be roped, tied,

And pulled out-snapped out

Or pulled out entirely,

Out from the earth-cave,

And the strength of the tree exposed,

The source, white and wet,

The most sensitive, hidden

For years inside the earth.

Then the matter

Of scorching and choking

In sun and air,

Browning, hardening,

Twisting, withering,

And then it is done.

Gieve Patel

President Barack Obama announced to a nation resigned to economic stagnation and numb from the pain of a war, over a decade long, that its trigger, Osama Bin Laden, has been killed in the middle of Pakistan. The stateless actor who had declared war on America on television was dead in an eastern shootout in his own refuge inside a nation, which, if mishandled, could have doomed South Asia in chaos, giving the Pakistani refugee from Saudi Arabia his biggest prize: his own nation, nuclear weapons included. Even America could not have bettered that. It took the United States 325 years from 11/09/1620, after the puritans had founded their own land, to annihilate Japan.

The killing of Bin Laden was a necessary act in a war that America had not declared on its Frankenstein. Bin Laden was America’s creation, who had turned into a wayward bête noire, producing a reincarnation of fascism, but of the Islamic variety, half-a-century after Hitler’s had been ended in Germany. Both Hitler and Bin Laden had seen the Jewish people as the beast that had to be slain. Bin Laden saw America as a Jewish henchman. So, he tore down the soaring symbols of usury in downtown Manhattan, igniting a war both against corruption in the bedouin kingdom of traders in the desert land his father had constructed for the Saudi monarchy and, in his mind, its Jewish enablers across the Atlantic.

Bin Laden was correct. Power and wealth have indeed corrupted the states of the world, as they always have, causing the vicissitudes of history since the birth of civilization for this is also human nature, not stainless perfection, but its correction was not eye for an eye, as brilliantly orchestrated as the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center may have been. Betwixt the destruction of the twin towers and his death a generation has been lost. Bin Laden’s statelessness has been in vain.

The killing of Bin Laden, a foregone conclusion for more than a decade, is not how American justice is rendered. America does not rejoice when it kills, even if those killed are its worst enemies. This is the American character. Without trial under the rule of law, even if execution is preordained, justice has not been done the American way except in the wild west of Clint Eastwood.

War by Bin Laden was a war fueled by the discontent on the ground and funded by his inheritance from his father. Those were the monies that had constructed the House of Saud. The killing of his tree was timely, for the backdrop of the bloodshot killing of Bin Laden on his turf by American intelligence, a hypothetical photograph not worthy of Life, has been the glorious uprising of liberty in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a docudramatic arbitration on internet time worth many lives. The rising sun over Giza has cast its long shadow across the Red Sea and the Sinai as if the god of Moses and the god of Mohammed, who are one and the same, want to end the fratricidal war in the desert.

May the soul of Osama Bin Laden rest in peace as the world lives on, for we all have lessons to learn from the tree of good and evil.