In Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” the narrator speaks of a looming and authoritative teacher, of whom he says: “Whether we liked him or not, he was never out of our minds. That was a secret of leadership.”
For the past five years, I have been brooding almost like a schoolboy – even a schoolgirl – about a man who actually did manage to don a cloak of invisibility. I have tried like a lover to read the mind and the mood of Osama bin Laden.
I have looked at innumerable photographs of his long, slender fingers and his wide-set, beseeching eyes. I have asked myself what he wants, even what he needs. I have concerned myself with his health – believing at one point that he might even have died – and have pored over rumors of his kidney dialysis (probably baseless) and his possible aorta-threatening Marfan’s Syndrome (more likely, and an affliction that he may share with Abraham Lincoln).
I cherish a hagiographic T-shirt of his features, bought in a nasty and hostile bazaar on the Pakistan-Afghan border as fleets of American warplanes were shifting the physical landscape around Tora Bora.
The purity of hatred can be finer and stronger than love. When people speak glibly about “the other,” I scorn their ease of expression but I know what they mean. For me, Osama bin Laden is the other. He is the enemy of everything I love and the emblem of everything I hate. I cannot bear the idea that, when he dies in agony and humiliation and defeat, I shall not be present to watch his expression change and to see him empty the whole bitter cup of shame.
Just kidding. It is a disgrace that a grown up and civilized and powerful nation like ours should go into spasms of panic at the specter of such a ghoul. Osama bin Laden is the most overrated narcissistic villain of all time, and doesn’t even possess the fascination of a Charles Manson. His Koranic babblings are the ravings of a clown.
When it came to a real fight, he tossed aside the crown of martyrdom and ran away. He is the spoiled or possibly neglected child of a vulgarly rich dynasty and made his name as the operator of a crooked multinational corporation that now goes by the boastful name of al-Qaeda. He is the hypocritical chief of a third-rate crime family and, as such, is fond of commanding murder from a safe distance. He is a rancid pustule on the rear end of sordid regimes – from Saudi Arabia to Sudan to Afghanistan – with whom he has enjoyed no more than a parasitic relationship. To call him a guerrilla fighter or an insurgent is an insult to the bravery of past folk heroes. Most of his victims have been fellow Muslims, and his rantings against all Christians, all Jews, all Hindus and all secularists condemn him to eventual irrelevance and defeat as well as disgrace.
We do bin Laden a favor by speculating in a febrile manner on his whereabouts. His mystique should be diminished, not enhanced, by the fact of his having become a fugitive. It is galling to realize that he was incubated inside, not outside, the perimeter of our supposed alliances, and that he probably still enjoys a degree of protection from high circles in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
But the confrontation with jihad was inevitable with or without him. If he was now to be captured by American forces, and if it were not for the need to do justice to all the victims of Sept. 11, 2001 – and the U.N. compound in Baghdad, and the Australian visitors to Bali, and the Spanish commuters in Madrid – I would prefer to see him confined for life to a small town in Alaska or Montana or upstate New York or rural Virginia, with a short-wave radio on which to continue delivering his sermons. We would swiftly learn – as we did with the pathetic Zacarias Moussaoui – to get over our choking fear of such freaks.
I have sometimes allowed myself an unsettling additional reflection. What if, on Sept. 11, 2001, he did us all a favor? The thought is obscene but it must be faced. Until, that date, the collusion between the Taliban and the Pakistani authorities was not even surreptitious, but warm and untroubled. There were even al-Qaeda sympathizers in the Pakistani nuclear program. Elsewhere in the world, Islamist forces were making quiet and surreptitious inroads from Holland to Indonesia. But five years ago the plot was “blown” and the mask torn off, and antibodies started to be created in our systems.
Wherever bin Laden is now skulking and recording his increasingly weird audiotapes, it cannot be where he dreamed of being as he giggled at the sight of humans leaping to death with their clothes and hair on fire. And wherever he is in point of place, in point of time he is in the seventh century. Let us not neglect this advantage.
Much depends on our ability to negate an ideology that openly and gloatingly celebrates death over life. This is a cultural as well as a military project. And it imposes a high obligation. No hasty or cruel action must be committed on the side of life against death. We must not behave as if we are frightened by this depraved character, because fear is the mother of panic, and of “extreme measures.”
Our crimes and mistakes are disfigurements, whereas his are signatures. But, unlike him, we are in no hurry, because a return to the seventh century is impossible, and the defeat of its avatars is certain.
This article was distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.
Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair columnist
