Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?

For some reason, there have been fewer and fewer jokes lately about Osama bin Laden, evilest of all evil villains. Until this weekend, that is, when a real groaner came up. It went like this: the United States hasn’t gotten any useful information in years as to bin Laden’s whereabouts and no one knows where he’s hiding. But U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates didn’t even crack a smile when he admitted this embarrassment in an ABC television interview.

Maybe he’s being coy for tactical reasons, like the Taliban chief doing time in a Pakistani jail who claims to have met bin Laden early last year at a meeting – not exactly the setting in which the U.S. would like to run into him.

There’s something startling behind that “joke” in that it brings to mind how the U.S. military – and later also the German army – was dragged into a shooting war. They wanted to wipe out terrorism and, above all, to capture the perpetrator allegedly responsible for the suicide attack on New York’s Twin Towers. Dead or alive, they didn’t care how. But despite the efforts of the world’s largest and most expert intelligence services, they know about as much now as they did before they started. Is that possible? Or is there perhaps something to the rumor that having bin Laden alive is just plain necessary for the West to continue on with its war, in the same way as the opposition needs him as their poster boy?

And so the killing will continue and the bodies will keep piling up, whether in bin Laden’s name or against it. And that’s a really bad joke indeed.