Every organization devoted to mass death needs a charmless, bespectacled, blank-eyed chief operating officer who inspires no one but keeps the gears of murder turning. Ayman al-Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden’s Himmler. President Joe Biden and most Americans will see his death as just revenge for the 3,000 innocents killed by al-Qaeda in the United States on September 11, 2001—and so it is. But I have to admit that Zawahiri’s end leaves me cold. Revenge is sour because it always comes too late. Three thousand to one: The numbers provide no comfort.

And think of Zawahiri’s other victims. Most of them were Muslims whose names are not carved in stone. It’s staggering to think how many human beings are no longer alive because this doctor from a prosperous Egyptian family embraced a hateful ideology that licensed him to kill. There was Shayma Abdel Halim, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, killed in 1993 in a Cairo suburb by a car bomb that Islamic Jihad, a terror group that Zawahiri later merged into al-Qaeda, intended for an Egyptian prime minister. There were the hundreds of Kenyans and Tanzanians murdered in al-Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998.

Remember the tens of thousands of Iraqis, most of them Shia, blown to pieces, shot to death, or beheaded by al-Qaeda’s local affiliate. At one point al-Qaeda in Iraq went on a killing spree of bakers in Baghdad. The body count in Iraq grew so high that Zawahiri worried it might hurt al-Qaeda’s image among the world’s Muslims.