Terrorist's death is cathartic to some, meaningless to most

Osama bin Laden was a bogeyman built up by the United States to justify its war on terror – but the man meant little to the rest of the world given over to an Arab spring.

Osama bin Laden was an illusion, a delusion, a fantasy - devised and destroyed in the span of a decade. Yes, he was born in 1957, and yes he first appeared on the radar of globalised media as a terrorist par excellence as early as 1990. But it was not until the events of September 11, 2001, that he emerged as the face of terrorism.

A mass frenzy was made to demand his head on a silver platter - and the visual intimation of North American news media is now doing precisely that.

Al Qa'eda is now a body without a head, a code without a decoder. Having performed his task in justifying the American "war on terror", bin Laden is now no more.

But for how long will he stay dead - that is, how long will it take for the insatiable appetite of American aggression to manufacture yet another face of terror?

As a figure, bin Laden never meant much to anyone except Americans. As a Muslim, he was outdated, out of step with the tempo of his time and the aspirations of a people he falsely imagined as his.

Americans, however, loved to hate him - like a cartoonish character from a Batman film. A Joker, bin Laden was a bogeyman. Americans manufactured the myth around him, built up his reputation. And Americans killed him - in their own minds, and in the mountainous hideouts of Pakistan.

For millions of human beings, Muslim or otherwise at the receiving end of American, Israeli and European belligerence, he was not a figure of resistance, but the mirror image of it, its exacerbation.

Indeed, bin Laden was a creation of America's war on terror in multiple registers. He was a product of the US war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and in the 1990s and beyond he became the coded catechism of remodulating the US military prowess for asymmetrical warfare around the globe.

In fact, bin Laden was a blueprint, a modus operandi, for the American military to upgrade itself strategically in a world where 19th century militarism no longer worked - as Israel learned in Lebanon and Gaza in 2006, and 2008-2009, and the US in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade.

The "war on terror" claimed thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, before its instigators finally declared its bête noire dead this week. Beneath the surface of the media-manufactured euphoria in the US, there is also a more quiet sense of closure, so that the memories of 9/11 can be buried in Ground Zero for good.

But how many innocent Afghans and Iraqis were killed by the US military machinery before that closure? When will those victims get their closure?

In bin Laden, the US successfully manufactured and oversold a face for the criminals that perpetrated the horrors of 9/11 and killed thousands of innocent people - and now they have put a bullet in that face.

But what about the other war criminals with the blood of countless Afghans and Iraqis on their hand? Will there ever be justice for them too: justice in a court of law, not "justice" by way of an extra-juridical, covert military operation in a sovereign nation-state without its prior knowledge or approval?

In the US, the corporate media is reporting the death of bin Laden as a moment of catharsis and justice. But in the real world outside that engineered cocoon, the death of bin Laden means little. He was dead and buried in the democratic uprisings across the Arab world.

For millions of Muslims around the globe, bin Laden was never the symbol of anything except a politics of despair they had long since abandoned while mobilising for their magnificent moments at Azadi Square in Tehran and Tahrir Square in Cairo.

The strategic significance of this news marks yet another futile manoeuvre to divert attention from where the real action is: the democratic uprisings in the Arab and Muslim world. If Col Muammar Qaddafi offered the US and its allies a new military foothold in the region to turn the tide to their own benefit, then the news of bin Laden's demise - killed in the mountains of Pakistan and buried at sea, with proper Islamic rituals no less - seeks desperately to push back the clock to the events of 9/11, to the "war on terror" with its usual suspects as the cast of characters.

The "war on terror" did not end on Sunday; it assumed a new posture. If al Qa'eda were to retaliate, it would be for the same reason, yet again to draw attention to itself. Al Qa'eda, whatever it is, hates the Arab and Muslim uprisings with the same intensity that the US, Israel and their European and Arab allies wish to counter them. Both the US and its allies - just like al Qa'eda - have a common interest in diverting attention from the grassroots, widespread, transnational revolutionary uprisings that have put both sides of this banality out of business.

In the midst of this charade, we must keep our eyes on the events taking place across the Arab world, which go against the very grain of American strategic interest in the region. All these tired and old players fear the consequences of the new game and want to push back the clock.

The birth of bin Laden was a ruse. The world at large, including millions of Arabs and Muslims braving domestic tyranny and global imperialism alike, will not take the bait again.

Hamid Dabashi teaches Islamic social and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York and is the author, most recently, of Islamic Liberation Theology:  Resisting the Empire