This time, Obama deserves credit for doing right thing

There is no sense of closure, nor should there be, as a result of the death of Osama bin Laden.

America should never be content to declare Sept. 11, 2001, a mere date in history. Nor should we focus all our anger on one man. The tragic deaths and heroic lives of that day should fuel our nation’s vigilance against complacency for as long as the Star-Spangled Banner waves.

Yet the death of Osama bin Laden is nonetheless a significant step in the continuing struggle to defend our country and our way of life against an enemy that is ruthless, resourceful and rapacious.

How the decision to attack and kill the al-Qaida leader in Pakistan will play out in the long run no one knows. There is a small chance that it will demoralize his followers and see them scurry into the shadows. There is a much bigger chance that it will embolden them and unleash an even greater wrath against America in the future.

Either way, it promises to bring into clearer focus the war between the individual freedoms promised by the West and the individual submission (or subjugation) advocated by Islamic extremists such as bin Laden.

And no matter what the future brings, the death of bin Laden is a just and justified penalty for a heinous crime that seared the conscience of humanity.

Some people have criticized President Obama for somehow not getting the death of bin Laden right — for waiting too long to decide (yikes! 16 hours!), for taking too much credit (“at my direction”) or for not releasing a photo of the dead body (“We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies”).

Such criticisms are, at best, ill-timed and monumentally out of proportion when compared to the credit that President Obama deserves for making sure that the day of reckoning actually arrived.

After 10 years of being unable to say for sure whether bin Laden was even alive or dead, are we now going to quibble over tactics and politics? Will a gruesome, bloody photo prove anything — other than the bad taste of parts of the American public, who would no doubt use the photo to exercise their “freedom of speech” in execrable fashion.

I put such vituperative complaints about President Obama in the same trash bin with the nonsense that was spouted against George W. Bush when he correctly declared in 2003 that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

I can promise you that President Bush did not declare that there would be no more American deaths in Iraq; nor did he declare the enemy defeated.

But that didn’t stop the magpies on the left from chattering for years about the false claim that Bush had declared “mission accomplished.” No, he did not. The crew of the aircraft carrier where he spoke was proudly taking credit for their own successful nine-month-long mission — and rightly so.

What President Bush had said was that the war on terror would continue even though “the battle in Iraq” had ended. What he meant in his declaration was that the battle against the Iraqi armed forces was over — not that the war against terrorism had somehow magically been won.

By the same token, the death of Osama bin Laden by no means can be taken to suggest that America’s task is over. If we wish to live free, we must be willing to defend that freedom. Let us be prepared to do so, but let us also learn to temper our skepticism and paranoia and renew our passion for civility.

I have no intention of forgetting why I didn’t like President Obama the day before May 1, and I most certainly will not like him any better in the future when he announces policies that I think will destroy our country, but when he does the right thing, when he does the necessary thing, when he does the American thing, then I am with him 100 percent.

Killing Osama bin Laden was the right thing to do. Congratulations, President Obama, and God bless America.