Eli Berman Authors Op-Ed on bin Laden
Bin Laden, fugitive and failure
05/04/2011
Eli Berman,
The San Diego Union-Tribune
There were many losers from 9/11. Osama bin Laden is among them. Bin Laden died a fugitive and a failure on his own terms: he did not replace the regimes he so despised. Peaceful demonstrators did that without him in Tunisia and Egypt, and may yet do the same in Yemen and Syria. Trapped behind the 16-foot brick walls of his safe house, would he have noticed that the dictator of Egypt was toppled not by Jihadists wielding Mikhail Kalashnikov’s assault rifles, but by college students armed with Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking program?
Nor did bin Laden ignite an apocalyptic war of civilizations. Quite the opposite, he induced an international, pan-religious effort to protect innocents against terrorist violence. Bin Laden survived just long enough to see the Arab League invite Western jets into Libya to protect Muslims from Moammar Gadhafi’s vicious thugs. Poetic justice.
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Eli Berman is an associate professor of economics at UC San Diego and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also currently Research Director for International Security Studies at the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).
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