Change: military, political, cultural (religious)

This morning the news is all about the death of Bin Laden.  It evokes that Tuesday morning in 2001 when the news was all about the attacks on the USA.  Some of the images from that morning are reappearing in this morning's news.  So are some of the questions.

In 2001 we heard that the world had changed.  Now we hear reporters commenting upon what has changed.  Will the death of one man, even this one, make the world a safer place?  Will it return Americans to our pre-9-11 sense of security?  I think not.  I hope not.  Let us not revert to naive illusions about our strength and our influence.  I hope we have learned something about ourselves (that we are vulnerable to criticism and to attack) and our place in the world (that we are not everyone's ideal or every nation's model).

Mark Juergensmeyer's comments about this death/killing in the larger context of ongoing political change in North Africa are insightful and instructive.  His suggestion that the end of the Bin Laden era is signaled less by the man's death than by popular, peaceful demands for regime change in Egypt is worth careful thought.  So too his exploration of the religious dimension of those protests in Egypt and elsewhere.  Here is a snippet.

The dramatic popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Islamic world have demonstrated that protests that have been nonviolent in their inception (and have become violent only in response to bloody attempts to repress them) have been far more effective, and supported with a more widespread moral and spiritual consensus.  
What brought down the tyrants in Egypt and Tunisia, as it turned out, was about as far from jihad as one could imagine. It was a series of massive nonviolent movements of largely middle class and relatively young professionals who organized their protests through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of electronic social networking.

What are the lessons here, not only for American foreign policy, but also for our own on-going efforts to live up to our ideals of freedom, equality, and democratic life?