Wait for the courier to return from a distant internet cafe with a thumbdrive, containing responses to his missives and advice. Wait – largely in vain – for news of new atrocities inflicted by his supporters on the cities of the West. Wait for responses from key lieutenants, only to learn that they had been killed by his enemies. Wait to see anyone respond to his exhortation that they bomb Los Angeles or kill President Obama. Wait with dwindling hope for the Arab masses to take up his call to jihad, only to discover that when they did finally rise up against their Western-backed regimes, they wanted nothing to with him. Wait to see dated images of himself to appear on TV, and wonder why they were becoming increasingly few and far between. Wait, and while waiting, jot down his increasingly muddled ideas — “strategic musings” rather than operational plans, as one U.S. intelligence operative put it, and wait some more. Wait, in vain, for the Muslim world to treat him with the same importance that the Americans did. Wait for the thumb drive. Wait for October…
And it’s hard to take at face value his exhortation for more mass casualty attacks on U.S. soil. Would if they could, wouldn’t they? As resistant as I am to likening every bad guy who crosses the U.S. path to Hitler, I can’t help being reminded of the much parodied scene from the German movie Downfall, in which Hitler, in desperation to stop the Red Army’s advance on Berlin, is hunched over a map moving around divisions that no longer exist…
In his fantasy about his own historic significance, bin Laden had embraced death and assumed it would catch up with him sooner or later. But by the time he died, he may have been unsettlingly aware that history had already meted out what in his mind would have been a harsher sentence – oblivion.
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