Goldmark: Age of terrorism: second decade

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.

It's now been a week since the raid on a villa in Abbottabad that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, and a lot of ink has been spilled over the insights this event provides about where we stand in the age of terrorism. There are a few things we can conclude:

Bin Laden's death changes little in the struggle with terrorism. Those who seek to sow mayhem in the United States in particular and the West generally will redouble their efforts -- witness al-Qaida's threat of retaliation on Friday.

The broad-based, genuinely popular uprisings in many Arab countries over the past three months create a boldly different and more hopeful path for Muslims in general and Arabs in particular, in contrast with the path of indiscriminate violence and religious militarism that bin Laden chose. The clarity of the choice -- the stark difference between these two alternatives -- should be tonic for all of us: Arabs, Muslims, Westerners, and citizens and governments right across the globe.

The location of bin Laden's hiding place and death underlines how wobbly and dysfunctional is the state of Pakistan.

The United States remains caught in a maze of mirrors in Afghanistan, where we're not sure if we're winning and we're not sure what really constitutes winning.

But the biggest lesson for me comes from the contrast between two defining, globally visible actions of the United States in the Mideast, which took place in two different decades under two different American presidents.

The first iconic action was the invasion of Iraq. It took place in the first decade of the 21st century under a strutting President George W. Bush, who was widely disliked and disrespected around the world. The Iraq adventure was large, messy, justified by a falsehood about weapons of mass destruction and incomprehensible to most of the world.

The second was the killing of Osama bin Laden, which took place in the second decade of the 21st century under a careful, thoughtful President Barack Obama, who is widely respected -- but whose strength and deftness in the international arena were in question. The killing of Osama bin Laden was precise, surgical and based on reasoning everyone in the world can understand, whether they agree with it or not.

The lesson? Limited, targeted and clearly understandable works. Large, open-ended and falsely justified doesn't. In both of these cases, there were clear choices. Bush made the wrong one, and Obama made the right one.

Most experts agree that bin Laden himself had not been "commanding" al-Qaida in any operational sense in recent years. He was a symbol, a sort of chief emeritus, whose authority and notoriety were invoked but who did not give operational orders. And the command structure beneath him has suffered serious losses.

We have yet to learn whether bin Laden's stature as a martyr will in death impart more impulse to the extremist terrorist cause than he in fact was able to provide as its nominal leader over the past five years.

Someday we are likely to see a photograph of bin Laden's body, swathed in cloth as Muslim tradition requires, lying on a wooden plank on the fantail of a U.S. warship as it is about to slide into the waves -- an ironic echo of the waterboarding to which so many of his associates were subject.

Let us hold in our minds that image and the pictures of smoke and fire pouring from the World Trade Center. It will be useful to reflect how much more advanced we are in the practice of revenge than we are in the art of anticipating new dangers and adapting to new challenges.

We are entering the second decade of the age of terrorism. Following the tragedy of 9/11 we have had a long respite from dangerous, well-prepared attacks in our homeland. That interlude of relative calm may be coming to an end.