Is the hunt for Osama over?

As our War on Terror in the Near East continues to drag on longer than anyone likes to think… As our War on Terror in the Near East continues to drag on longer than anyone likes to think about, sometimes you have to wonder how we’ve been doing with catching that rascal who helped start this whole mess. What’s Osama been up to these days? He’s been really quiet lately.

Over the first half of this decade, Osama’s mug shot was among the most infamous and familiar faces you’d see in international news reports. For obvious reasons, he never made public appearances and his whereabouts were never clear, and yet the very thought that Bin Laden still walks the earth fuelled both our War on Terror and the dreams of the jihadists who revere him like their own Che Guevara.

Over the past couple of years, though, we’ve heard less and less actual news regarding Bin Laden, in spite of politicians invoking his name practically every day. In the meantime, as our resources are devoured more and more by the Iraq War and our government wrangles with surmounting criticism from the global community, the spotlight has shifted away from the World’s Most Wanted Man as the chances of catching him seem more distant than ever. Nowadays, Bin Laden’s spectral presence on the world stage has faded to the point that people have begun to wonder if he’s even still alive — and this Saturday, even as I write this, a BBC article has just reported that a French newspaper, the L’est Republicain, leaked a French secret service memo that claims Saudi secret intelligence is convinced that Bin Laden died just a month ago from typhoid fever somewhere in Pakistan.

France’s President Jacques Chirac only expressed surprise that a secret memo had been leaked, and refused to make any further comments. Officials in Pakistan and the United States won’t confirm anything, either, and for now, the matter still seems to be treated as a secret matter.

It’s certainly interesting that this news about Osama Bin Laden’s possible demise is being handled in such a hush-hush manner, and that leaders like Chirac sound more miffed than anything else that this information should be read by the public. To be fair, the ultra-secretive nature of Bin Laden himself means that any news about the guy will be difficult to verify. But regardless, the implied “don’t-be-nosey” attitude of the involved intelligence services just comes off as somewhat shady.

The illness and death of Bin Laden would certainly help explain why he hasn’t even updated his catalogue of videotaped sermons for a couple years. And now that it seems possible that the old bastard that the United States wanted “Dead or Alive” could be dead, the authorities who have been searching for him all this time seem reluctant to encourage the theory. With the near-mythic status that Osama has cultivated, there are definitely reasons why both anti- and pro-Bin Laden parties would prefer to keep Bin Laden’s status obscured.

Bin Laden’s supporters such as Al-Qaida would want to think that their great leader is still hanging in there, as a living symbol of defiance to the Great Satans of the West. It would be a different story if Bin Laden died dramatically in a hail of enemy gunfire, because that would make him a bona fide legendary martyr. It’d be much harder to mythologize him as a victim of crippling typhoid fever.

For proponents of the War on Terror, Bin Laden has been a riveting image and a very effective bogeyman to rally against, even as the hunt for him became essentially peripheral as we got ourselves sucked into the Iraq vortex. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, the whole idea was to bring him and his organization to justice. He’s been hunted for so long now that the military’s efforts would certainly feel somewhat cheated if a disease managed to kill him before Americans could. It would not be entirely unlike how Kenneth Lay’s prosecutors felt when the old, disgraced Enron executive died of a heart attack before they could get him a long prison sentence. There’d be no refreshing sense of justice, no humbling courts, no dramatic captures. Nope, just typhoid fever.

Yet even as we consider the prospective end of the notorious Bin Laden, perhaps we should reflect on how our current battles abroad have become so far removed from our original purpose of nabbing the people who orchestrated Sept. 11, 2001. Even if he isn’t dead now, the campaign we ran to capture him hadn’t really gotten anywhere before America found other distractions. And as the ghost of terrorism in the form of ideologies has been proving too vague and abstract to really conduct an effective war against, the United States has already found more concrete bogies in countries like Iran and Venezuela. Those countries are already buddying up amongst themselves in opposition to America, and I can just imagine how Karl Rove might think about this as he eats lunch: “Yes! Finally, some real nation-states to fight!”

E-mail Konrad at klk27@pitt.edu.