With all the jingoistic and triumphant celebrations, you would think Obama won World War Two. If we take a closer look, what we have is a miserable failure and a planned execution flaunting the rule of law Obama had promised us in 2008.

For ten years, the world’s most powerful armies, enormous intelligence organizations using technologies we cannot even begin to fathom were unable to catch a pedestrian with a Kalashnikov wondering foreign countries. So much for triumph.

But worse is the man who promised us rule of law, assuring us that the judicial system was good enough to deal with terrorists, who railed against torture and promised to close Guantanamo, who ruled out using the CIA to kill people abroad, is the same man who ordered the execution of Ben Laden when it might have been possible to arrest him.

At a White House dinner Monday night, Obama made a slip when he congratulated the men “who captured and killed Ben Laden” but the slip is noteworthy. There was never any question of capture.

Somebody did not want a trial. I should think those tried at Nuremburg in 1945 and 1946 had more to answer to than Ben Laden. Our leaders trumpet every day the lessons learned from those trials as their guiding lights.

A trial of Ben Laden would have been interesting. To begin with there is no material evidence I know of linking Osama to 9/11. If my memory serves me right, the attacks were planned, organized and financed in Germany. Any new insight to what really happened that September morning would be good to know and would either infirm or confirm all the conspiracy theories out there.

Secondly, it would have been eye opening to hear how Ben Laden and the CIA worked together for so many years. How was it that the man managed to elude escape?

Thirdly, we could have learned more about the workings of al Qaeda. As far as I know, al Qaeda is an idea and not a centralized organization with a hierarchy. Such information could silence a lot of the no-nothing chauvinists out there celebrating an extra-judicial killing.

This is important. Although most Arabs and Muslims do not share Ben Laden’s views, it is also necessary to admit most see the US as part of the problem and not part of the solution.

Americans may be mourning the deaths of three thousand civilians from 9/11 and five thousand soldiers but the Arab and Muslim world is literally crying the deaths of hundreds of thousands from America’s war on terrorism.

If Obama flouts his own “rule of law” rhetoric, denying us the trial and “justice served”, then we must understand those who see the US standing the moral high-ground as the most cynical of hypocrisies.