OBL, R.I.H.

With earnings release season winding down to the last few stragglers, the Market seems to be slipping into a state of being decidedly undecided. Whatever catalysis to be had from those little reminders of just how resilient, how lean & mean so many companies got coming out of 2009, has been spent. M&A activity, those typically Monday morning reminders of just how much market “efficiency” and “control premia” tend to disregard each other, can only stoke bullish enthusiasm so much. Volumes of shares change hands (in that second derivative, metaphorical sense that the computers that drive most trading don’t have hands) at a rate that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, but it is all sound and fury, signifying nothing but a few more gobbets of fat clinging to the fingernails of the proprietors. We can now expect the Market to lurch along, not so much meandering as in a series of low grade fits of “risk-on” or “risk-off’, with commodity prices seeming to set the tempo. (Is it just me, or does the Commodities Game seem to running on empty? If so, we could be in for a few weeks or even months of a lot more "risk off" days.)

The one purportedly catalytic bit of news that got this week started really wasn’t that substantive a development. Count me among those who are delighted that Osama bin Laden now sleeps with the fishes (though, in one particular sense of that expression, not so much.) Good will come of it, but only incrementally, as not that much has changed. This is not a defining moment in the “long war” that this clever fellow did so much to fan back to life. He was no evil genius masterminding mayhem from his underground lair, at least not to any discernible effect for the past few years. I had come to think of him as forced into retirement. A villa on the outskirts of Islamabad, with no Internet connection, however lavishly appointed, might as well be Devil’s Island, or Elba, c. 1815, not much different than “life without a shot at parole”. I was never quite convinced that the tapes he supposedly released every so often were genuine, and find it more probable than not that the Pakistanis made him a deal along the line of “lie low and be quiet and we won’t rat you out.” He was, in my estimation, no longer in the game, and as such, his departure to unthinkable hotter precincts does not really change the game.

Well, maybe a little. It does matter, in minds of our enemies and those tempted to give them aid, comfort and support, that a resolution so forcefully asserted by one U.S. president was carried out by his seemingly opposite successor. Whatever partisan theatrics divide us, this was a promised act of retribution that we just showed to world we would not be deterred from. Do harm like that and boast about it, you can run but we will find you, no matter how long it takes. It will also matter tactically insofar as whenever Mr. Big gets taken out, the network can be folded up some. This was an operation where in order to find the kingpin, a lot of operatives needed to be identified and then allowed to carry on, with the expectation that their activities will lead to other operatives higher up the hierarchy. Anyone identified as high ranking enough within AQI to potentially have contact with OBL has quite likely been left to go about his business on the chance that he might lead us to the big guy, Now that he has been eliminated, Special Ops forces, no doubt assisted by a ton of incremental intel gleaned from all those captured hard drives, can be a lot more aggressive in terminating what remains of the AQI network.

I have to admit that my first reaction on reading the news of this event was one of high skepticism. It was the “buried at sea” headline that got me. Here was the digital equivalent of “EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT!” that Public Enemy Number One was dead, and there was a footnote indicating that before the sun came up over Texas the next day, the corpus had been express shipped a thousand or so miles to become food for crabs. I avoid conspiracy-think like it was it warm, flat beer, but this struck me as nuts. (Actually, it brought to mind George Orwell’s 1984, with Winston Smith trying to ascertain whether Oceania was allied with or at war with Eurasia.) Or, eventually, something that only government functionaries would think to do. The rationale, sensitivity to some Islamic sensibility about burying a body within 24 hours, is patently weak. Did we do that for his colleague (and sons) in Iraq? It is inconceivable that his minions would ever accord such respect to their untold countless victims, infidel and Islamic alike. Cultural sensitivity be damned. Considering all that this creep did to burnish the image of Islam, it is arguably an insult to the religion to accord him such respect.

The biggest reason that this weeks big event is, substantively and operationally speaking, a non-event, is that OBL & Associates trashed their franchise a long time ago. Jihad and all that (especially the mocking, tweaking and occasionally killing the unbelieving Other that is us) had a certain cachet when it was new and in the main intangible. But as the entire Islamic world has learned, when AQI comes to town and sets up shop, it just gets creepier and creepier as the weeks roll by. It sounded good in the abstract, but after a few visits by the morality police, a plurality of these folks seem to have decided to take their chances with decadent western influence.

It matters that vengeance has been wreaked, that something our adversaries will recognize as honor has, at great cost and after exceedingly great effort, has been satisfied. But I think that the more substantive development occurred a day or so before. That would be the Colonel who owns Libya witnessing up close and personal that the Western powers he thought he could play have him in their sights and will kill him if they get another chance. He knows that he is almost out of time to cut a deal or die trying. This was a week when we reminded the most hateful of our enemies that we really can be serious if we have to. It gives me hope, a basis for optimism in a world that continually tempts me to just check out and let the crazies have it.