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Lost in the moral maze surrounding Osama bin Laden’s death? John Ford’s classic western will show you the way As a certain someone once said: there’s an old poster out west … actually, forgive me. There’s an old poster by my desk, as I type this, for a movie that would have been at the forefront of my mind this week even were I not staring at a picture of Jimmy Stewart holding a pistol and looking rather troubled . If you haven’t seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , then consider yourself immensely lucky, because you have the most wonderful treat ahead of you. The gazillions who know and love the John Ford classic, though, will be familiar with the story, set in a frontier town menaced by the outlaw Liberty Valance. Our principals are the grizzled cowboy John Wayne and the idealist newcomer Jimmy Stewart. A lefty lawyer beginning his political career, Stewart takes a frightful kicking from the start, but sticks with his programme of social reforms for the town – you may be on the point of spotting the analogy – working to improve education and even racial equality. Of Liberty Valance, he insists to John Wayne: “I don’t want to kill him. I just want to put him in jail.” Who’d have thunk it, then, that the person who should face down the outlaw in a duel is not John Wayne, but Jimmy Stewart. And who’d have thunk it even more that it is the bookish idealist who kills Liberty Valance with a single shot, in a piece of good fortune he can scarcely believe. Needless to say he becomes the town hero, and gets Wayne’s gal. It is only subsequently that Wayne tells him that the shot that killed Valance in the so-called duel was in fact fired by him, from across the street. Not the fairest of fights, you might be thinking – but in the Duke’s mind, the end justified the means. He urges Stewart to run for office and live up to the status this misattributed act has bestowed upon him – which Stewart duly does, becoming the state’s first governor and then a senator. Yet weighed down by the moral compromise on which his success is based, he finally confesses all to a local newsman when he returns from Washington for John Wayne’s funeral. Now he has learned the truth about Liberty Valance’s death, does the reporter debunk the myth? Please. He burns his notes, uttering the immortal line: “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And so to Barack Obama, who will forever be The Man Who Shot Osama Bin Laden, with all the inevitable moral grey areas the title implies. Admittedly, the facts about Bin Laden’s shooting have been corrected rather sooner than those concerning the death of Liberty Valance. At this rate, it will emerge by Monday that the al-Qaida chief was naked, with his hands up, and shrieking, “Not the face! I’ll tell you everything!” when he was gunned down. But whilst it might appear that the ineptitude of the White House communications department is rivalled only by that of the Pakistani security services, those first golden hours of mythmaking have shaped the narrative that will endure in American consciousness. The legend has become fact. For my own part, despite considering myself a liberal, I must confess my tears have struggled to liquefy over the manner of the unarmed Osama’s dispatch. It’s not that my bleeding heart is all out of type A, nor am I summoning the cartographers, having finally discovered the outer limit of my liberal sensibilities. But it has been a while since I’ve had to make imperfect sense out of this type of moral muddle without the aid of West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. This extraordinary tale really is made for Sorkin, that most brilliant poet of liberal realpolitik, in whose hands its moral complexities and compromises would stay lodged in the public consciousness far longer than the current mudslinging between the CIA, Pakistan, the military and the international lawyers could ever guarantee. Channel-hopping only a few hours before the White House announced Bin Laden’s killing, I happened to stumble upon the Sorkin-scripted movie A Few Good Men, and watch for the umpteenth time Jack Nicholson’s terrible bastard of a colonel deliver that horribly convincing post-moral speech about why Tom Cruise’s college boy lawyer can’t handle the truth. That movie ends with Colonel Jessep facing trial, quite rightly, and it is difficult to disagree in theory that the Bin Laden story should have ended in a courtroom too – though what the al-Qaida Nuremberg would look like is anyone’s guess. Rather than taking place post-conflict, it would involve trying one’s enemy in an information war, while that war is still ongoing. (Incidentally, can you remember a single thing from Saddam’s trial? I’m ashamed to say all that sticks in my mind is the thought of the trapdoor opening at his hanging.) Indeed, as far as The Man Who Shot Osama Bin Laden goes, one can’t overlook that its Liberty Valance precursor was a story about the end of frontier – the creation of civil democracy out of a land of vigilantism and wild west brute force. Given that we are supposed to live in that civil democracy today, I know it would have been better – or perhaps righter – to have brought Osama to trial. But I can also see how it was never going to work out that way. And I do hope that Aaron Sorkin is the man to create enduring cinematic magic out of that Gordian knot. Osama bin Laden Obama administration Barack Obama John Ford James Stewart John Wayne US politics United States Marina Hyde guardian.co.uk