There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden’s carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.

As James Fenton puts it in his poem Prison Island, “Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.”

casuistic

As Bertold Brecht’s character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat.

The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden’s capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was “unarmed” when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have

And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve.

If I am right that the defeat and discredit of bin Ladenism is inevitable, then it ought to follow that panic measures, or measures taken in fear, are even less justifiable. The resort to extralegal methods of interrogation, for example, or any want of care in protecting civilians from the consequences of military action, are not to be excused in

I wrote at the time that he had done the West an enormous unintentional service, by in effect blowing the whistle on his own global plot.