The target was Brainiac, not Ra’s Al Ghul

I am not extremely well versed in military affairs.   My Dad is an engineer who works for the Canadian military as a civilian, which means in my teenage years I got to go to the “Take your Child to Work Day” and partake in some military things like shooting a gun or getting ride in a helicopter.   Despite the fact that many people on the site have pigeon holed me as some sort of extremely left wing individual that only craves peace (as well as hugging the occasional tree) I do believe in a robust military.   In Canada we actually take pride in our commitments to international peacekeeping (or at least we used to anyway) and I think as a political arm that militaries are necessary, especially in the modern world where wars have the potential of global cataclysm, that a peace loving country like Canada can have a huge positive effect on the global balance with a military that enforces the ideals that Canada believes in.  

Still as I said I am no expert on military affairs.   I was quite pleased yesterday with the news that Osama Bin Laden was killed.   I don’t believe that evil under any banner is ever acceptable, and this man conceived and conducted such heinous acts that I believe that he got his just rewards, if only too late.   In the wake of his death we are seeing a wave of what could be expected, those saying that he is still alive, that he died 10 years ago, that Obama wanted him alive until now for political gain, that Obama is using this start a more encompassing war in the Middle East and so on.   Suffice to say that these conspiracies have about as much traction as the Moon landing hoax conspiracies.  

What I found most interesting of all though was the target.   Osama was of course a high profile target and of extreme political and military importance.   He was not actually the main target of the raid.   As is clear by now, the Navy SEALS wanted to take him alive, but dead was just the same.   What they were really after were the computers.   In the modern day of international communications, politics, war and terrorism, the computers with all the information were more important than the head of the organization himself.   And so to make an analogy to comics, this was essentially what my title says, that the individual is not as important as the information (or that no terrorist is as important as his hard drive.)   It will be interesting to see if fiction is the future incorporates this more into its storylines.   After all in today’s world even the Joker would need a cell phone.           

the title actually made me read through it, well done.

@warlock360

Read more if you like:

I don't believe in policing the world, or "peacekeeping" as some might call it. 

@cyberninja

Interesting, so you don't like superheroes then?

I'm also glad he's dead. From what i have read they gave him the chance to surrender but he chose not to, they also say that Osama and the people he was with tried to use a women as a human shield, which just goes to show what cowards they really were.

I just hope in the coming months the police and military stay on high alert for revenge attacks.

The prize is always the intelligence, never the leader. I mean, if the assassination plot on Hitler in 1944 succeeded, would that have ended World War II much more quickly? I think not, there were dozens of hardcore Nazis ready to take his place.

Though I'm glad this son of a b*tch is dead after he took the lives of thousands. What goes around comes around Osama.

Its especially in this day and age of post-Cold War strategy when current the current paradigm of terrorist grouping is multicellular activity.  Sure, Usama was a big target but it was probably just as important to gather what he knew as it was to actually capture/kill him.  After all, a growing concern that be that his death doesn't change anything and its just as vital to us knowing his intelligence regarding other cells/factions of al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups as much as possible.