Some weeks ago, President Bush was asked if he knew whether Osama bin Laden was dead. Mr. Bush answered that if Osama was dead, so much for that problem, if he was not, the hiatus would not be for very long.
Mr. Bush then moved on to speak of other aspects of the al-Qaida war than whether its architect was still alive. There is the public impression that he is obsessive on the question of whether bin Laden is alive, but the records do not substantiate this. He has mentioned bin Laden's name only a couple of times in the days since 9/11. The inclination back then was to think of Osama as a kind of anthropomorphic executive of the evil that terrorism had struck us with.
But it wasn't long before we learned that Osamaism was sharply different from Hitlerism, which would indeed die with a single decapitation. Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson had one egregious moment at the great Nuremberg trial when he suggested that defendant Hermann Goering was planning, if he escaped the gallows, to return to public life to revive Hitlerism. Everybody squirmed, including the other defendants. They knew that Hitlerism was dead, felled by a suicide's bullet in the Berlin bunker.
In the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers assault, a few observers noted that any sense that the war against the terrorists would be consummated with the capture and death of Osama bin Laden was misleading. Some of us expressed the hope that Osama would not be caught and disposed of, precisely because too many might then be persuaded that the threat he represented, brought on by 9/11, would then have passed.
Everybody knows that killing Osama would be no more effective in what we are up against now than killing the original Canadian carrier in the early '80s would have been against the problem of AIDS in the United States.
But this doesn't add up to an assumption that it is unimportant that Osama is alive. It has been established that indeed he is alive, or at least that he was alive only a couple of weeks ago, when he voiced views and cited data that clearly established that he was. If someone discusses the Dow Jones of yesterday, we know that he was alive to do so.