Andrew Hagen

Osama Bin Laden is dead. He hasn’t provided any proof of life for years. If he wanted to, he could hold up a front page of any newspaper, get his photograph taken, and have it disseminated. He hasn’t done it. He must be dead.

There have been audio and video tapes from “Osama Bin Laden” released since he last gave proof of life. In my view, these tapes are either old tapes re-edited or forgeries. Perhaps Al Qaeda has someone who sounds a lot like him. Perhaps one of his many sons has his voice. Nothing released constitutes proof of the continued life of Osama Bin Laden. Even those tapes where he mentions Iraq are not proof of life. After all, thanks to the recent secret memo, we now know that Al Qaeda has been an active ally of Saddam Hussein for years. (*)

Therefore, it was a good decision of US–led coalition forces in Afghanistan to put less emphasis on the hunt for Bin Laden, and to tell the media that neither capturing him, nor killing him, nor obtaining his corpse is essential to the war. (†)

It’s time to move on and focus on the task at hand. The Afghanistan situation is improving, the Iraq situation is holding steady, and we need to stop chasing ghosts.

A reference is in order to the post–World War II hunt for Adolf Hitler. He was said to be in South America, for example. After the Cold War ended, the Soviet archives were made available. We then learned that Joseph Stalin knew all along that Hitler had committed suicide. Stalin had Hitler’s bones buried under a road his tanks paraded over. (‡) Stalin chose to keep this a secret. The recent book Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor (§) tells the story. Like the fate of Adolf Hitler, we may not know what happened to Osama Bin Laden for many years. Eventually, however, someone will talk.

And if Osama Bin Laden surprises me and lots of other people, and pops his head out again, he then will be hunted down and killed or caught once and for all.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2003 at 15:41 and is filed under Global War on Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.