UK IN THE FIRING LINE

At 3.00 am GMT this morning, President Barack Obama received confirmation that Osama Bin Laden had been killed during a carefully planned attack by US forces on a compound in Pakistan. His death will change little, and almost certainly guarantees a major vengeance atrocity somewhere in the West. But the event is also a game-changer in terms of next year’s Presidential elections.

The first news releases from the White House this morning were specific to the point of repetition about the fact that President Obama ‘personally approved the project and ordered the attack’. Well they might: we can now expect to see the President’s popularity ratings soaring again. Not only does his personal ownership of the attack score manifold points on his somewhat lacklustre macho dimension; it also finally puts to bed the ridiculous conspiracy bollocks about his place of birth and his alleged softness on Islamism.

Reading across a range of sources this morning – especially in the US – it seems that, as usual, nobody has calculated the enormous potential for revenge….an emotion that is central to the ideology of fundamentalist Islam. In order to kill one man (who, I’ve always maintained, was nothing more than an Arabian Empire fantasist with little real global influence on Islamist terrorism) we can now look forward to even stricter security. The ghastly Julia Gillard was, predictably, first out of the blocks to say, “we must now be even more vigilant in the fight against terrorism”.

The reality is that, for America, Bin Laden had become the ugly guy in the Wanted poster. The man who blew up the bank-train years ago, and had been holed up in the badlands ever since. A sort of cross between Jesse James and Butch Cassidy. But anyone who thinks this means the end of trains being blown up is naive to the point of being dumb. The bogey man is now dead, but the ‘worldwide threat’ remains. You don’t have to be MENSA to see where this is going.

Without doubt the most vulnerable target in the aftermath of this assassination is the UK – partly because of our idiotic involvement in Iraq in the first place, but primarily as a result of our hopelessly lax immigration security policy. Per head of the population, we have more Islamic radicals than any major Western country. Even worse, we don’t know where most of them are. For both the alignment with the US and the fluffy pc approach to cultural fascism, we have the Blair Witch project to thank….and standard Mandarin incompetence.

George W Bush described the killing as “a great victory for America”, and Barack Obama himself  hailed the successful mission as “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda”. But then, he would say that: he has an election to win.

As for Obama’s Presidential hopes, the extremely poor calibre of GOP candidates to take him on has always looked like an invitation to re-elect. The Slog has argued since early 2010 that Obama is a classic one-term President: but with enemies like Osama Bin Laden and Donald Trump, Mr Obama has no great need of friends. If Trump and Romney are the best the Republicans can produce (they aren’t, but they do have the most money) then we may well be in for four more years of fiscal policy – courtesy of an economically illiterate, headless chicken. And that would surely spell doom for the USA as we know it.