Success Quote by Bruce Sterling

Sterling’s bite lands in the clash between personal grief and institutional procedure: the Pentagon isn’t a bloodless machine here, it’s a workplace where “colleagues [were] killed and maimed.” By leading with that blunt proximity, he grants the emotional logic of revenge without romanticizing it. The next sentence pivots to the deadpan brutality of policy-speak: “find… and kill him and his cult.” “Cult” is doing covert work, recoding al-Qaeda from geopolitical actor to fanatic brand - less an army than a contagion - which conveniently flatters the righteousness of hunting it down while also hinting at the danger of turning war into exorcism.

The subtext is a critique of how legitimacy gets manufactured. “Naturally” is Sterling’s acid: it performs a shrug that both acknowledges the intuitive impulse to retaliate and questions the ease with which that impulse becomes state doctrine. He’s not arguing against the hunt so much as spotlighting how quickly “legitimate” becomes self-certifying when the aggrieved party holds the world’s biggest apparatus for violence.

Then comes the kicker: “mixed success at the job.” Calling it a “job” drains the epic aura from the post-9/11 War on Terror and reclassifies it as messy, bureaucratic labor - subject to bad intelligence, political constraints, mission creep, and the uncomfortable fact that killing a leader doesn’t necessarily kill an idea. In early-2000s context, it reads like a corrective to triumphalist rhetoric: the desire is clear, the mandate is assumed, the competence is not guaranteed.