Podhoretz: Bin Laden 'Didn't Get Away With It'

John Podhoretz writes in the New York Post:

He has paid. Osama bin Laden spent nearly a decade scurry ing on spindly legs like a hairy arachnid through a web of his own construction to avoid American justice -- until, at last, as President Obama said last night in his appropriately triumphant and elegiac remarks, "justice has been done."

Bin Laden did not get away with it. That is what is most important -- morally, politically, strategically.

His attacks on the United States have been answered over the course of the past 10 years with a war in Afghanistan, counterinsurgent attacks in Iraq, and counterterrorist sacrifices and hardships that have changed American daily life for the worse.

And now bin Laden has been made to answer for all that and for his murders.

He has been made to answer not only for the evil of 9/11 but for the monstrous acts that preceded 9/11 -- the bombing of a US residence in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the destruction of two US embassies in Africa in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

Bin Laden killed our soldiers and our diplomats before turning his spectacular evil on ordinary civilians and tourists on that brilliantly cloudless day burned in our memory like the black gash that tore a hole in the sky over Ground Zero as the fires bin Laden lit slowly, slowly burned themselves out.

Bin Laden has, finally, been held to account. ...