Yet Another Dissection of the bin Laden Killing

First, it comes out now that bin Laden was not armed and did not use his wife as a human shield, which implies to me that perhaps the reason for his burial at sea was to obscure the powder burns caused when a muzzle of a weapon is pressed against the head.

Second is the question of, "Why Now?," and I think that this analysis is the one closest accurate: that the House of Saud determined that with unrest through the Arab world, he had become redundant:

Normally I do not speculate on operational matters; to solicit information on secret matters even from very good sources is like telling Pinocchio, "Lie to me." Some considerations here are obvious, though, even without the usual disinformation. It is hard to conclude otherwise that Bin Laden died this week because people who knew his whereabouts chose this particular moment to inform the US authorities. What has changed? The simple answer is: everything has changed. Instability in the Muslim world has reached a level that makes Bin Laden redundant.

The overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the near-overthrow of Yemini President Ali Abdullah Saleh, along with the eruption of instability across the whole of the Arab world, changed al-Qaeda's position. From Riyadh's vantage point, Bin Laden was a loose cannon and an annoyance, but no threat to the strategic position of Saudi Arabia.

The royal family preferred to allow some of its more radically-inclined members to provide support to Bin Laden on a covert basis in return for al-Qaeda's de facto agreement to leave the Arabian Peninsula in peace. As a WikiLeaks cable revealed, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a secret December 2009 memo, "More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Toiba] and other terrorist groups."

With the destabilization of Yemen, that sort of modus vivendi became obsolete. As the terse diplomatic announcements of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' April 6 conversation with King Abdullah made clear, the Saudis were deeply concerned about the destabilization of Yemen by al-Qaeda along with Iran.

I think that he's wrong about one thing: al Qaeda wasn't done in by some sort of Iranian alliance, these folks are Salafists, and consider Shia to be heretics, but rather they are terrified at the idea that Jihadism is fading as an outlet for desires for reform and democracy in the dominion of the House of Saud, and they are casting about for some other way to maintain their kleptocracy.