Hurrah.

In the days and weeks to come all sorts of information about the mission to capture/kill (or was it only the latter?) will gush out. It is already clear that the Americans had been painstakingly trying to get to Bin Laden via his main communication trail, namely a highly trusted courier, using information gleaned (nice way of putting it?) from AQ personnel in US custody.

And, finally, they located the spot and swooped. Did they noisily call for him to surrender first, sure that he and his ultimate cronies would start to shoot and so allowing all necessary force to be used to finish the job quickly?

Lots of nice words being said about the fact that the Pakistan government helped bring this about, obviously to hide the excruciatingly embarrassing fact that Bin Laden was living not in a hole in the remote mountains but in fine highly protected style not far from the Pakistan capital.

What a superb moment it must have been when, in effect, the head of the CIA in Pakistan asked to see the head of Pakistan intelligence and the head of the President’s office to inform them (a) that an operation was under way to deal with Bin Laden on their territory, and (b) that they were going to be highly delighted and cooperative about it: "the armoured vehicle is waiting outside – no discussion, let’s go!"

And, crushed, they went. 

Look out for fevered attempts by US Democrats not to acknowledge that any significent information was extracted from AQ detainees (especially at Gitmo) while President Bush was in charge.Unless, that is, President Obama decides that given the facts his best form of defence against human rights leftists is to proclaim that in the struggle against terrorism some hard choices need to be made, then loftily move on amidst higher approval ratings. 

Andrew Sullivan points gleefully to the fact that a US President with the middle name Hussein ordered this superb operation.

Fascinating listening to the BBC and other media this morning, including moving interviews with relatives of victims of Bin Laden’s violence: "Justice at last has been done".

I imagine that only few people round the world will think that that rich spoiled Bin Laden did not get what he ‘deserved’. Wealthy and privileged mass killers enter a different moral space, in which some very basic rules apply. He did indeed get Justice, living by the sword and going down in his posh compound in a blaze of high-tech laser-targeted gunfire.

As if to add to the symbolism, a woman human shield died too.

Just pause for a moment to think about that one aspect, if it’s confirmed.

As these anti-Western lunatics faced their sudden doom, one of them grabbed a woman (servant? girlfriend?) )and hoped that the West’s very moderation and decency would allow him to escape death. This existential coward who had tried to kill so many innocent people finally relied upon our own goodwill to save himself. 

Happily for him, but tragically for her, this time we had none to spare.

One seemingly well informed BBC pundit this morning argued that AQ had long lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab world – the popular upheavals across the Middle East show that mass opinion wanted some sort of greater pluralism, not messianic terrorism against the West. Plausible enough, although perhaps we are simply seeing the long march Muslim Brotherhood tendency of eroding ‘Western’ power bit by bit winning favour instead – same ultimate goals, more patient methods?

That’s for the next couple of centuries to sort out. Today, happy day, let’s remember Mark Steyn’s vigorous insistence back in 2002 that OBL was already an ex-parrot:

I said in the Sunday Telegraph a couple of weeks ago that Osama was ‘deceased’ and in the Daily Telegraph back in March that he was a few specks of DNA somewhere in the Hindu Kush. Everyone else seems to think he’s alive and well.

Recently, several hundred of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry exhumed every corpse in an al-Qa’eda cemetery near Kandahar and, failing to find a body with a very long beard and a very short penis, concluded that Osama had gotten away.

Well, Mark was dead wrong. Osama latterly was alive and well enough, in Pakistan.

Still that piece had the right title for OBL’s obituary: "Dust bin"