Bin Laden: Does he still matter?

“He may have eluded justice and the long reach of the world’s most powerful military force,” said Tony Karon in Time. But eight years after Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden has been rendered a marginalized, abject nonentity. True, the man responsible for the worst act of terrorism in U.S. history remains at large. Just this week he released yet another taunting taped message against the West. But al Qaida has paid dearly for murdering nearly 3,000 innocent people. The coordinated response of the civilized world has reduced the terror network to “a couple of hundred desperate men,” hiding in fear along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, watching the sky for drones and Hellfire missiles. Once the would-be leader of a latter-day caliphate, bin Laden is now living “a life of duck and cover” at “a political address otherwise known as oblivion.”

He may be in hiding, said Peter Bergen in CNN.com, but bin Laden is hardly irrelevant. The videos released over the years show both bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, in clean, pressed clothing, illuminated by electrical lighting, indicating that they live in comfort in homes, not a cave. And while he no longer manages al Qaida on a daily basis, bin Laden remains its inspirational leader. That’s one reason the U.S. must continue to try to capture or kill him, said USA Today in an editorial. We owe it to the 3,000 people he murdered on 9/11 to bring him to justice. Until he’s dead or in prison, he will offer like-minded fanatics “inspirational proof that you can get away with mass murder.”

But even if we got bin Laden tomorrow, said Ron Smith in the Baltimore Sun, he would have accomplished many of his goals. He baited the U.S. into invading Afghanistan—a war that still has no end in sight. By invading Iraq, George W. Bush gave al Qaida a bonus, plunging us into an ugly occupation that resulted in nearly 4,000 U.S. deaths, cost more than $700 billion, and “deepened anti-American sentiments among millions of Muslims.” Consider also the toll on America’s national character, said Kevin Drum in MotherJones.com. Our frightened leaders embraced torture, and a cowed population meekly accepted “intrusive security checks” that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. “If what bin Laden got at the cost of 19 lives and a few box cutters was a failure, I’d hate to see what counts as a success.”

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