Osama Bin Laden and the Super-Villain Fallacy

Good news that Osama Bin Laden has been killed by US security forces.  He essentially declared war on us, and when you do that you accept that the country that spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined is going to be coming for you.  Of course he wanted to die, so I guess everyone got their wish.

So it's a nice symbolic victory, but let's not pretend it has more strategic significance than it really has.  I really don't understand the American obsession with single villains as the Key to Everything.  Bin Laden was certainly the most important person in Al Qaeda, but he's now had ten years to carefully plan for the organization to survive his death.  In any case Al Qaeda central was already pretty decimated by US actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its only hope for effective terrorism since 2001 has been among small cells that have little to no connection to the central leadership.

This brings to mind the country's reluctance to bring Guantanamo prisoners to trial on US soil.  Remember the haughty speeches about the terrible danger to us in bringing these terrorists into the US?  It's like these guys are Magneto, capable of destroying us all by their meer proximity.  In reality they're just people, and our fear of them gives them way too much credit.

What I'd like to see is a realistic acceptance and understanding of the danger really posed by terrorism, along with a sober assessment of what costs are worth incurring to fight it.  It's incredibly easy in the US to shoot up or blow up a crowded place, be it a government building or a mall.  We can never be totally safe from that, just as nobody anywhere in the world is totally safe.  But let's not freak out about Jihadists establishing a Sharia-based dictatorship in the West- that's just making their fantasy into our nightmare.  And it's not realistic- there is no existential threat from Islamist forces.  They can make our lives unpleasant for a brief time, and they can kill some of us, but they can't fundamentally harm our society unless we allow it.