What would Obama really do, if the enemy was no longer hidden, but was now hiding in plain sight?

It’s not entirely up to him because the enemy gets to vote. What would the enemy do if it knew or suspected that it had been unmasked? The Pakistanis began damage assessment operations immediately. They took everyone in the compound into custody, swept it themselves, took away the helo parts.

Obama’s problem is this. If he doesn’t act on knowledge acquired from the raid and there is another major terror attack in the US or Europe, he will have the devil to pay. Only if Enemy X remains forever quiescent does the problem go away.

The alternative of course is to wipe the knowledge from US institutional memory as well. To burn the intel evaluation and shoot the man who wrote it, then shoot the man who shot the man who wrote it. But that is probably infeasible and creates problems of its own.

Knowledge is perilous. Donald Rumsfeld once said, “there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” When something moves from the “unknown unknown” column into the “known known” column it transfers a huge weight along with it.

My own guess is that Obama will be inclined to use such knowledge, if he had it, to negotiate with the enemy in order to make it stop. I’ve referred to this in many previous comments. Osama’s death creates a political crossroads at which the President can either keep opening the can of worms or try to get the enemy to walk away. But I don’t think the President will succeed because terrorists and terror-sponsoring states are one-trick ponies.

I posted a link to the trailer of the the movie “Devil’s Double” which is based on the life of Uday Hussein. What always struck me about people like Uday is why they didn’t quit while they were ahead. Why, like some pathological gunfighter, did they keep looking for the next draw. Didn’t they know that someplace, somewhere there’d be someone faster on the draw than they were?

The same is true for terrorism. They don’t know when to stop. And therefore, even if the President hopes he can deal with them, he probably can’t. The enemy gets to vote on the continuation of history. Once an unknown is known, it is altogether too complicated to make it an “unknown unknown” again. As Milton put it:

Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained.
Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.

The Devil has entropic qualities. It’s hard to unscramble an egg.