Osama Is Dead But the War Goes On

David Horowitz throws a wee bit of cold water on the "Got Him!" euphoria:

Osama bin Laden was a symbol of the Islamic jihad. After 9/11, surveys by al-Jazeera and other sources indicated that between 10% and 50% of Muslims regarded him as a hero. That is somewhere between 150 million and 750 million people. Symbols are important, and the death of the symbol of Islamic jihad is important. But the jihad will go on.

The fact that bin Laden was killed in a mansion near Islamabad (fitting name) is but one mark of the support he had in the Muslim world. But by the time our forces reached him, ten years after 9/11, the center of the jihad had long passed from the caves of Waziristan to the Middle East — to the Islamic Republic of Iran, to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and to the fount of the Islamic hatred and crusade against the West — the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Obama will take credit for the death of al-Qaeda’s leader, and he deserves it — for the aggressive war he waged in Pakistan in particular. This was a forward strategy that provoked the wrath of the “liberal” establishment when Nixon tried it in Vietnam, and Reagan in Libya and Bush in Iraq. Unfortunately, this is only the right hand of Obama’s strategy towards the jihad. The left hand is simultaneously stoking the fires of Islamic aggression in its heartland, the Middle East, and our war with this evil is just beginning...

Winston Churchill's stirring words uttered in the heat of battle against other megalomaniacal totalitarians spring to mind:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.