There is probably no other person in history who altered human behaviour and undermined our presumed freedoms and collective quality of life on the same scale as Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden easily ranks among the greatest evil-doers of the modern era, alongside Hitler and Stalin – not in terms of the death toll from his deeds but the pernicious ripple effect of his actions throughout the world.
The genius of the organisation he formed is that it functions along a simple franchise model whereby any disaffected and fanatical group, in any corner of the planet, can hang out its shingle and operate as a terrorist cell under the al Qaeda brand. In this small globalised world, the effects of his actions were immediate.
By orchestrating terrorist acts which would have been deemed too far-fetched by the most coke-addled Hollywood producer - events such as September 11 which continue to test the boundaries of comprehension, no matter how many hundreds of times you have seen those jets sliding through the glass of the Twin Towers – bin Laden started a psychological war with every decent person on the face of the earth.
The defining hideousness of what bin Laden did was his determination to turn civilians in social settings such as offices, public transport, hotels and nightclubs into his battleground of preference. Past tyrants still placed some store on the art of soldiering and the importance of winning set-piece battles. Bin Laden’s preferred quarry were people who were working, commuting, taking their kids to school, going on a holiday with their friends.
Bin Laden killed thousands of people. He also killed the notion of implausibility. After September 11 nothing was so theatrically hideous as to defy the imagination. In the space of a decade we have been left with a string of images which you wish you could erase – the falling man from 9-11, clerical workers clambering over body parts at Madrid’s Ochoa train station, fathers hiding in wardrobes at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Hotel texting goodbye to their families as armed teenagers methodically knocked on every door hunting down guests.
For the families and friends of the 88 Australians among the 202 killed in Bali by al Qaeda’s sub-brand Jemaah Islamiyah, there will always be what Barack Obama described so powerfully yesterday as bin Laden’s most terrible legacy – “The empty seat at the dinner table.”
For those of us not directly touched by any of these atrocities, none bigger for our country than the two Bali bombings, our lives have still been dramatically affected. The budgets of western countries such as Australia were recalibrated in the aftermath of September 11 both to boost homeland security spending and commit to contentious wars in Iraq and subsequently Afghanistan. Our ability to move freely was undermined. Assumptions about freedom of speech and assembly were challenged.
While most people regard it as a small and necessary sacrifice in this new age of terror, the simple act of catching a plane has changed forever more. Every time we take off our shoes – or as happened to me, make your toddler daughter take hers off after they beeped, just to make sure she didn’t have semtex hidden in the soles of her Pumpkin Patch slip-ons so she could blow up a passenger jet travelling between Sydney and Melbourne – we’re making our own little surrender to the sick new world Osama bin Laden created.
There is debate about the extent to which bin Laden’s assassination will change anything. Middle East analyst and author Robert Fisk, a strong critic of the United States, yesterday described bin Laden’s death as an irrelevance, saying he had already succeeded in the formation of al Qaeda as a globalised movement against the west.
This assessment underplays the draw of bin Laden as a messianic figure who inspires young men across the Islamic world to take up his call. Go into the flea markets in big Javanese cities such as Surabaya or Bandung, and you will see dozens of stores selling bin Laden’s likeness silk-screened onto t-shirts and wall hangings. In the same way that the image of Che Guevara galvanised the Left in the 1960s and 1970s the serene image of a smiling bin Laden is the marque of militant Islam. Al Qaeda’s marketing was backed up with bin Laden’s frequent use of video and audio, via his preferred network Al Jazeera, which had the effect of being a clarion call to his followers throughout the world.
The fact that Osama is gone does not mean that someone just as bad or worse will not fill the void, or that the fanatics who already support him could not unleash their own brand of payback in the coming days.
But for now this feels like the first really good day the civilised world has had in quite a long time. The idea of bin Laden arriving in the hereafter to learn that he’s been sold a pup, that there are no virgins but just a burning, eternal hell, is quite a pleasing one.
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