bin Laden is dead but he has changed the world. Discussions will work around the edges--Was it the CIA's fault originally for supporting him against the Russians? Is he really dead? What is the role of Pakistan in all this? Should he have been buried? Was he a real military leader or was he an armed dilettante?--but his real contribution is to the world of violence and this contribution will go long remembered.
Savagery against the innocent has always been the trademark of the warlord or the criminal. Kidnapping, symbolic murder, extortion has always used leverage against the innocent to make the dominant but reflective and socially concerned weak. But their motives have always been booty; money and women. It has been until now a tool exclusive to the criminal (drug cartels), the stone aged warrior (Apache), the dark ages horseman (Attila).
There will always be examples of this behavior--The Lionheart at Acre, Jackson and the Creeks--but these terrible exceptions are remembered as exactly that: Exceptions. There is only one man in modern times who has generated violence pointedly at innocents under a banner of righteousness as a matter of policy: Hitler. He has now been joined by bin Laden who has refined this barbarism and put it in the hands of the individual.
bin Laden has downsized and made personal the atavistic savagery that peaks out now and then in our history and made it modern. For him there is a new circle in hell.
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