Links: bin Laden edition

1. Noam Chomsky in Guernica: My reaction to Osama bin Laden's death.

   We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

   ... [And] the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

2. Lawrence Wright in New Yorker: The Double Game: The unintended consequences of American funding in Pakistan.

3. NYTimes report on Bin Laden's Diminished Life in a Shrunken World.

4. Felix Salmon: The Hermetic and Arrogant New York Times. [He has an awesome picture -- from this analysis -- of the Twitter network that helped spread the news of Osama bin Laden's death.]