Quote (Sioux @ Aug 1 2022 08:28pm)
Doesn't matter if 98% of people haven't heard of him, the world is safer today than it was on Friday.
Edit: I wonder who's collecting the 25 million bounty
That this guy deserved to die and the world being safer aren't equivalent statements. When ISIS was around, we were definitely safer with a toothless leader of Al Qaeda who was more interested in opposing our enemies than actually attacking the west. Now that ISIS is gone, eh, there's still the issue that any potential leadership vacuum of Al Qaeda means the existing aligned networks could get taken over by more radical elements, which would be a net negative for us in the long run. Which, of course, is how ISIS was created in the first place. Zawahiri is hardly the equivalent of an Assad or Hussein who keeps the fanatics of a country in check with an iron fist, so that's not a clean comparison, but he was still a washed-up has-been more interested in opining on social issues than a radical interested in blowing up embassies anymore, so any change might not really benefit us. The best thing we can say is that any geopolitical risk from killing him is so low at this point that his personal guilt outweighs it and lets us not fret too much about killing him.
or in short, no, we're not any bit safer