The Regional Significance of Bin Laden’s Death

Writing in the New York Times, Roger Cohen stated “Osama Bin Laden is dead — and so is an old Middle East” and noted that the recent events in the Middle East demonstrate how the al-Qaeda leader had lost touch with Arab youth who have “move[d] away from from the politics of rage and revenge, directed mainly outward, toward a new politics of responsibility and representative government, directed mainly inward.”  Cohen also notes the simultaneous shift in U.S. policy, which is, for the first time, making democratization in the Arab world a serious U.S. objective.   Juan Cole, writing at Informed Content, reiterated Cohen’s remarks that Bin Laden’s ideology is outdated in light of recent events and called for President Barack Obama to do another “great good for this country abroad” by getting the U.S. out of Iraq.  Ian Black echoed Cole and Cohen by stating that “the dawn of largely peaceful change in the Middle East and North Africa this year rendered [al-Qaeda] irrelevant….Facebook and Twitter turned out to be far more effective agents of change than any ‘martyrdom’ attack on apostates, crusaders and Zionists – the most familiar objects of hatred in the jihadi lexicon.”  Marc Lynch also discussed Bin Laden’s irrelevance, but stated that “if the revolutions fail, economies don’t improve, and elections produce unattractive political leadership, it is easy enough to imagine frustrated youth a few years from now again finding al-Qaeda’s message attractive.”

David Ignatius, writing in The Washington Post, argued that the fall of al-Qaeda was due to the enemies it made in those areas where they gained power due to the loss of life from terrorist attacks.  The U.S. relations with the Islamic World suffered, he said, due to our “over-reaction to al-Qaeda’s attacks.” Anne Applebaum noted that the success of the operation which killed Bin Laden was due to careful preparation and patience, a strategy and framework which needs to be applied to U.S. policy on a broader basis.