"Mission accomplished"?

Wow. The US finally got Osama bin Laden. Given his silence the last few years (he doesn't call, he doesn't write), I figured that he was already dead. Apparently not, though certainly now. So, Obama achieves what Bush could not ... though I'm sure the chain of events that led here stretches back years.

Can't say that I've ever thought that this long-awaited event changes a whole lot though. It's symbolically significant, of course, but it's not quite like he was a formal "leader" of Al-Qaeda - that organisation (such as it is) is more like a franchise than a centralised hierarchy. This will hurt them a bit, but it's probably more of a PR hit than anything else. And it's not beyond them to spin it into a new round of recruitment I suspect.

Anyway, all that said, it's probably net-good. Al-Qaeda have nothing to offer the modern world, so the sooner they're dispersed, the better. But there's no point in achieving this while failing to address the underlying issues that might drive successor organisations.