Tony Parsons: The world changed on 9/11 - Osama bin Laden's death will not change it back
Osama bin Laden is dead. His condition is described as satisfactory. In fact, no death has caused such wild euphoria in the West since Adolf Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker.
Is it too much to compare Osama bin Laden to Hitler?
Hitler was directly responsible for the deaths of millions. Bin Laden was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands.
And yet for 10 years nobody in the West could doubt the pure, implacable evil of Osama bin Laden. He – and his fanatical followers – would have happily danced on our graves, and the graves of everyone we love.
9/11 changed everything.
In the United States, never again could they live with the illusion that America was untouchable.
In the United Kingdom, we had lived with terrorism for years and never had the feelings of smug security. The IRA had taught us that a mad man with a bomb is difficult to stop. But 9/11 was something new. That terrible day, when 3,000 people of many nationalities of every faith and creed were murdered on live television, taught us how deeply and profoundly the West was despised.
The men who hijacked the planes on 9/11 were demanding nothing. They had no list of ultimatums. There was no clear objective.
They wanted only our destruction.
They died in the inferno with the innocents they slaughtered, and their names are largely forgotten by history.
But in the wake of 9/11, one name reverberated around the world – Osama bin Laden.
He was the architect and inspiration of 9/11, and the poster boy for a strain of Islamic terrorism more virulent than any terror group the West had ever known.
AL-Qaeda was a new kind of enemy, more like a poisonous virus than an army. Al-Qaeda had no single passport, no borders, no uniform. It was an enemy that existed everywhere from the caves of Pakistan to the backstreets of British cities.
Al-Qaeda was difficult to see, difficult to beat, difficult to even confront – because it was largely an idea.
But if the murderous form of terror had a face, then it belonged to Osama bin Laden.
The crowds in America who are dancing in the street are rejoicing over the death of a man who would have happily seen their entire country burn.
For the most part, they seem to be in their late teens and early 20s – old enough to remember 9/11, old enough to have watched the towers come down, old enough to be part of the generation that learned America can be hurt, and burned, and bombed. Just like everywhere else in the world. Part of the generation who were taught this by Osama bin Laden – nowhere is untouchable. Not even America.
To many British eyes, the chanting and the laughter will seem a little overdone.
A murderous ******* has died – nobody won the Super Bowl.
This is not the end of the war. You would need to be a moron of George W Bush proportions to imagine that what came of age on 9/11 had now been avenged, and put behind us, and could never happen. Islamic terror existed before 9/11, and it will exist after the death of Osama bin Laden. 9/11 – for all its spectacular and sickening imagery – was not the first act of Islamic terror.
It was not even the first bin Laden-inspired attempt on the World Trade Center.
It would be a grave mistake to imagine that what began with 9/11 will end with the death of Osama bin Laden. He was not that kind of leader. The world changed on 9/11 and it will not change back with bin Laden’s death.
He is there every time you get on a plane, and have to go through the endless rigmarole of post-9/11 security.
He is there when you are asked to open your bag at a concert or a sporting event.
And, believe me, his spirit was at the royal wedding, and in the eyes of every policeman who stopped me before I got anywhere near Westminster Abbey.
Osama bin Laden put fear into the hearts of the western world. This is especially true in America. Before 9/11, catching a plane in America was a lot like catching a bus anywhere else.
After 9/11, a fog of paranoia and suspicion and fear descended, and it is difficult to imagine that it will ever lift again.
I have heard his death described as symbolic but it is more than that.
The death of Osama bin Laden, who built a mountain of misery for countless thousands in the West to live upon, was not mere symbolism.
His death is real enough.
Al-Qaeda have other leaders now – but none who so embodied the implacable wish to spread murder and mayhem across the western world.
As I write these words, I have heard Ed Miliband say three times that, “The world is a safer place now that he is dead.”
If only that were true. Unlike Hitler, the regime which bin Laden gave life to will not collapse with his death. Anyone who remembers the terrible images of 9/11, and 7/7 in London, will feel a grim satisfaction at his death. How could we feel otherwise?
He hated us. The men who followed him hate us. They told us many times, and they proved it with their despicable cowardly actions.
Yes, the world is a better place with Osama bin Laden shot dead and buried at sea.
But you would need to be a sunny-natured optimist to imagine that we are safer than we were before.
Only George W Bush and Tony Blair were stupid enough to believe that the war on terror could be won by killing just one man.
Osama bin Laden was living in a nice neighbourhood that he shared with the Pakistani equivalent of our Sandhurst military academy.
The Americans are so wary of our Pakistani allies, that they told the Pakistan intelligence service precisely nothing about the operation to kill him.
This was always the most terrifying thing about Osama bin Laden.
There were millions who felt like him. There were millions who hated us.
And now he is dead. And if celebrations of the young Americans who are high-fiving and whooping outside the White House turn out to be a little premature, well, you can hardly blame them for cheering the death of Osama bin Laden.
He did something terrible to all of us. He taught us how much we are hated.
And now he is gone, taken out by special forces almost 10 years after 9/11. Ten long years when he never tired of crowing, “I’m still here.”
Not any more, Osama.
Mirror
