Quote (excellence @ Aug 8 2022 02:29pm)
Yeah that's a weird note about the way Biden tried to overhype it, probably intentionally in hopes of channeling his own Bin Laden / Al Baghdadi / Suleimani moment. But while Al-Zawahiri was a good high ranking target, he wasn't on par with any of those. He didn't really have any involvement in 9/11 or the Cole bombing beyond his parallel senior Al Qaeda leadership at the time. At worst you could say he might have been aware of the 9/11 plot during their Afghanistan meetings and lent his political support to it, but he didn't plan or organize any of it or involve himself at all. He
was personally involved in some anti-western terrorism in Egypt, the mastermind of the 1997 Luxor massacre, which was violent enough it actually backfired and divided the Al Qaeda members with many coming out against it and basically turning all of Egypt against them.
So you can make a good argument he's a baddy who deserved it. But as I pointed out, for decades it was actually in our best interests to keep him alive and in charge of Al Qaeda, since he was relatively toothless and a staunch anti-ISIS hard liner and those internal divisions he stoked among muslims kept them from aligning against us under the banner of a force far, far more radicalized than Al Qaeda ever was. He fought right alongside us. And with ISIS defeated and America totally giving up in Afghanistan and Syria, we no longer really had much reason to care about all that, so killing him now was probably the best time.
Still its hardly something worth a victory lap. A few short years ago we were allied with this guy and sending his troops guns and missiles to fight our enemies, and I'm not even talking all the way back in the Soviet Afghan war, I'm talking Obama years. Now we blew him up. Deserved it? Sure. But uh, killing our strange bedfellow allies isn't exactly heroism.