[Marwan Shehadeh, an Islamist activist and researcher in Jordan, argued that Arabs would see Bin Laden’s death through the lens of their antipathy to American policies — interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and support for Israel — without regard to his views. “Osama bin Laden is a popular charismatic figure for many people,” he said. “They consider Osama bin Laden a model for fighting American hegemony.”]
By Anthony Shadid And David D. Kirkpatrick
Predictably, the reactions ran the gamut Monday — from anger in the most conservative locales of Lebanon to jubilation among Shiite Muslims in Iraq, thousands of whom fell victim to carnage committed in the name of his organization. Some vowed revenge; others expressed disbelief that the man killed was in fact Bin Laden.
But most remarkable perhaps was the sense in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere that Bin Laden was an echo of a bygone time of ossifying divides between West and East, American omnipotence and Arab weakness, dictatorship and powerlessness. In an Arab world where tumult this year has begun to refigure that political arithmetic, it often seemed that the only people in the region citing Bin Laden’s name lately were the mouthpieces of strongmen like the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the former Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, evoking his threat as a way to justify clinging to power.
For a man who bore some responsibility for two wars and deepening American involvement from North Africa to Yemen and Iraq, some say his death served as an epitaph for another era. Many in the Arab world, where three-fifths of the population is under 30, recall the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, as a childhood memory, if that.
“The Arab world is busy with its own big events, revolutions everywhere,” said Diaa Rashwan, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Cairo. “Maybe before Tunisia his death might have been a big deal, but not anymore.”
Or, as Farah Murad, a 20-year-old student at the German University in Cairo, said of the attacks, “I have a vague recollection, but it was so long ago.”
The United States’ pursuit of Bin Laden has long prompted suspicions in an Arab world that remains skeptical of America’s support for Arab dictators and its alliance with Israel.
Doubts emerged Monday over the timing of his killing. Some suggested that his whereabouts were long known and that his killing came in the interests of some party — be it the Obama administration, Pakistan or others.
In many quarters, there were calls for revenge and anger at his death, most publicly by Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister who heads the Hamas government in Gaza, who called him “a Muslim and Arab warrior.” Others insisted that the battle Bin Laden symbolized between the United States and militant Islamists would go on, and indeed, his organization had always been diffuse enough to survive his death.
“Mr. Obama said, ‘Justice has been achieved,’ ” said Bilal al-Baroudi, a Sunni Muslim preacher in the conservative Lebanese city of Tripoli. “Let’s see how.”
He added: “We dislike the reactions and the celebrations in the United States. What is this great victory? What is the great thing that they achieved? Bin Laden is not the end, and the door remains shut between us and the United States.”
Even then, the denunciations of the killing were often nuanced.
Marwan Shehadeh, an Islamist activist and researcher in Jordan, argued that Arabs would see Bin Laden’s death through the lens of their antipathy to American policies — interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and support for Israel — without regard to his views. “Osama bin Laden is a popular charismatic figure for many people,” he said. “They consider Osama bin Laden a model for fighting American hegemony.”
At the same time, Mr. Shehadeh argued that in the Muslim world, Bin Laden’s death might come to symbolize a different kind of revolution — the shift from violence toward other forms of political engagement, buoyed by the hope for change that the Arab Spring represents.
As if underlining the notion of a watershed, the Muslim Brotherhood said that with Bin Laden’s death, “the United States should leave Iraq and Afghanistan.”
In Libya, where Colonel Qaddafi has relentlessly called his foes acolytes of Bin Laden, whatever sympathies might have existed seemed to evaporate in the churning of a homegrown revolt. Eswahil Hassan, a doctor in the eastern Libyan city of Darnah, one of Libya’s more pious cities and a place that felt the weight of Colonel Qaddafi’s repression, said the news of the killing hardly caused a ripple Monday morning.
On word of it, he said he and a friend at the hospital had talked about the troubles Bin Laden had caused for Libyans, who suddenly had to prove that they did not belong to Al Qaeda. The friend was happy to see Bin Laden gone, Dr. Hassan said.
“To hell with him,” he quoted his friend as saying.
In Misurata, Libya, a rebel stronghold under siege by government forces, a group of armed rebels similarly expressed satisfaction at Bin Laden’s death, saying they hoped it would allow the United States to divert more military resources to their fight.
Citing reports of the gunfight that had killed the Qaeda leader, they said he had been shot twice in the head.
“Now for Qaddafi, two in the head,” said Ali Ahmed al-Ash.
“No,” said his friend, Mohammed bin Zeer. “For Qaddafi, three.”
Bin Laden’s death will inevitably be seen as another signpost in the hesitant evolution of political Islam’s relationship with the Arab state. In 2001, Bin Laden was often seen as a symbol of an embattled religion, the very personification of people’s frustrations at a faith seemingly overwhelmed by a Western power. A corollary was the Islamist activists’ own repression within the Arab world; many have noted that Ayman al-Zawahri, Bin Laden’s deputy, was radicalized in the jails of authoritarian Egypt.
A sense of helplessness, be it in Cairo’s poorest neighborhoods or the most traditional quarters of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, appeared to underline his support, particularly for a movement that eschewed rigorous ideology for a fetishized violence that served as an end in itself.
“After the cold war was over and America was the only power, he was the only one counter-balancing America,” said Islam Lotfy, an activist and leader of the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest mainstream Islamic group.
Though still tentative, the Arab uprisings, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia, have introduced the beginnings of a new politics, one in which Islamist currents may have a stake. While anger remains over American policy and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, attention has largely turned inward, as activists deliberate what kind of state will emerge.
“The problem now is not how you can destroy something, how you can resist something, it’s how can you build something new — a new state, a new authority, a new relationship between the public and leadership, a new civil society,” said Radwan Sayyid, a professor of Islamic studies at Lebanese University in Beirut.
OBAMA FINDS PRAISE, EVEN FROM REPUBLICANS
[He was initially warned against seeking higher office because his name looked and sounded like Bin Laden’s. His campaign assertions that he would unilaterally act against “high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan were met with charges of naïveté from rivals — including Hillary Rodham Clinton — for telegraphing such a move. The president’s advisers declined to discuss the political ramifications of the Bin Laden killing. But they said that they were mindful of the lessons of 1992, when the approval ratings of President George Bush rocketed after the Gulf War.]
By Jeff Zeleny And Jim Rutenberg
Former Vice President Dick Cheney declared, “The administration clearly deserves credit for the success of the operation.” New York’s former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said, “I admire the courage of the president.” And Donald J. Trump declared, “I want to personally congratulate President Obama.”
As fleeting as it might prove to be, the positive tone stood in blunt contrast to the narrative Republicans have been working to build in the opening stages of the 2012 presidential campaign.
The argument that most potential Republican candidates have been making — that Mr. Obama is an indecisive leader, incapable of handling rapidly evolving events around the world — suddenly became more complicated. And the boost in stature for Mr. Obama, even if temporary, comes when a number of Republicans are deciding whether to commit themselves to the presidential race, and offered fresh evidence that he might be less vulnerable than his opponents thought.
The development came at a good time for Mr. Obama, who received the worst foreign policy rating of his presidency in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, with 46 percent of respondents saying they disapproved of his handling of international affairs. But the implications for the president, who will visit the World Trade Center on Thursday, were impossible to predict.
The nation’s unemployment rate remains relatively high, and the economic recovery has yet to gain traction. High gasoline prices are pinching consumer budgets and eroding confidence. Seventy percent of Americans in the Times/CBS poll last month said the country was on the wrong track, and the White House is heading into what could be a bitter fight with Republicans about spending and raising the debt limit.
But at a minimum, Mr. Obama has been dealt another high-profile opportunity to try to position himself above the bitter partisan fray and offer a voice of reasoned compromise — a theme consistent with his strategy over the past six months of shedding Republican efforts to cast him as a partisan liberal out of touch with the country’s values.
“The world is safer; it is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Obama said Monday. “Today, we are reminded that, as a nation, there’s nothing we can’t do when we put our shoulders to the wheel, when we work together, when we remember the sense of unity that defines us as Americans.”
The terrorist attacks that Bin Laden masterminded in New York and Washington a decade ago caused a significant shift in the nation’s politics. It remained to be seen to what extent his killing — dramatic as it was — would reorder the political landscape.
The developments came at a big moment in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, with new prospective candidates like Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana facing pressure to jump in. Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor who just returned from two years as ambassador to China to open a presidential run, found his efforts to trumpet his foreign policy experience immediately overshadowed.
“The president deserves and will receive credit for Bin Laden being killed on his watch,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who advised Mr. Giuliani’s 2008 presidential bid. “Like Sept. 11 and its aftermath, this is a moment that transcends politics.”
Karl Rove, the Republican strategist for President George W. Bush, said that party’s crop of presidential aspirants would be wise to not be “churlish.” But he said he did not believe Bin Laden’s death would be a deciding issue in the 2012 campaign.
“This will tend to cause a lot of people to say we got our job done,” Mr. Rove said, noting a similar reaction when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003. “This is a moment that will require him to say, ‘Here’s what needs to be done to prevail in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Yemen, in the broader war on terror.’ ”
For Mr. Obama, the killing of Bin Laden represented a significant mark in his evolution as a national political leader, a career that has developed entirely in the decade since 9/11.
He was initially warned against seeking higher office because his name looked and sounded like Bin Laden’s. His campaign assertions that he would unilaterally act against “high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan were met with charges of naïveté from rivals — including Hillary Rodham Clinton — for telegraphing such a move. The president’s advisers declined to discuss the political ramifications of the Bin Laden killing. But they said that they were mindful of the lessons of 1992, when the approval ratings of President George Bush rocketed after the Gulf War.
Samuel K. Skinner, the White House chief of staff at the time, remembered how Mr. Bush emerged with approval ratings of around 90 percent only to lose to Bill Clinton the following year.
“Everybody was shocked at how quickly things had dropped, precipitously,” Mr. Skinner said in an interview Monday. “Because of economic issues — and people’s perspectives of where the economy was — we were basically down south of 50 percent by October and November, and we were never able to recover.”
More recently, the bump in the polls that George W. Bush received after the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 evaporated within months.
In his first presidential campaign, Mr. Obama reaped considerable political benefit from his anti-Iraq war candidacy. In his second, he is hoping that he reaps the same level of benefit from his established role as a commander in chief who sent more troops to Afghanistan, authorized military strikes on Libya and signed off on the mission to kill Bin Laden.
John Ullyot, a former Marine intelligence officer who served as a Republican spokesman on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the operation was “a gutsy call because so much could have gone wrong.”
“The fact that Obama approved this mission instead of the safer option of bombing the compound was the right call militarily,” Mr. Ullyot said, “but also a real roll of the dice politically because of how quickly it could have unraveled.”
