The Ghost of Abbottabad

“Jihad will continue even if I am not there,” Osama bin Laden stated days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Ten years later, the terrorist who traumatized a large part of the planet and caused the death of thousands of innocents has been killed in his Pakistani refuge in Abbottabad. His physical death has been met with relief and jubilation in the United States. But his ghost and the fear of reprisals still linger. For even when he was invisible and couldn’t be found for 10 years, bin Laden remained a strong presence. He embodied a capacity for mobilization and a nuisance that will outlast him. From now on, he will be the “martyr subito” for the fools of Allah. Flag of an ideology more than strategy of the nebulous al-Qaida, bin Laden will have steered radical Islam in a considerable bend. He was the anti-Communist ally of the West in its fight against the knock of force of the ex-USSR in Afghanistan; he became the emblematic head of the anti-Western “holy war,” the linchpin of the “Axis of Evil” dear to G.W. Bush. Blood-red wire of this elliptic trajectory: religious law, the fight against the infidels, Islamism reconquering against the “crusaders.” In exhibiting the trophy of this grand criminal of world history, Barack Obama succeeded where his war-happy predecessor had failed. In the United States, like on the international scene, this success of the American president fell in a sheer drop. But this symbolic and ephemeral event doesn’t counteract the movement of the tectonic plates of the Arab world, unfavorable to Washington. After having lost their principal ally, Egypt’s Mubarak, the United States must have noticed with scorn last Thursday the reconciliation between Palestinians of Fatah and the Islamists of Hamas: a Hamas that doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist and who condemned the “assassination” of the jihadist bin Laden yesterday. Peace in the Middle East, where Obama has pinned many hopes, seems further away than ever.