Peter Bergen on OBL

From CNN.com:

Though bin Laden’s body may have been buried at sea on May 2, the burial of bin Ladenism has been a decade in the making. Indeed, it began on the very day of bin Laden’s greatest triumph. At first glance, the 9/11 assault looked like a stunning win for al-Qaeda, a ragtag band of jihadists who had bloodied the nose of the world’s only superpower. But on closer look it became something far less significant, because the attacks on Washington and New York City did not achieve bin Laden’s key strategic goal: the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Middle East, which he imagined would lead to the collapse of all the American-backed authoritarian regimes in the region.

Instead, the opposite happened: The U.S. invaded and occupied first Afghanistan and then Iraq. By attacking the American mainland and inviting reprisal, al-Qaeda, which means “the base” in Arabic, lost the best base it had ever had: Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. In this sense, 9/11 was similar to another surprise attack, that on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, a stunning tactical victory that set in motion events that would end in the defeat of imperial Japan….

The responsibility for that act of hubris lies squarely with bin Laden. Despite his reputation for shyness and diffidence, he ran al-Qaeda as a dictatorship. His son Omar recalls that the men who worked for his father had a habit of requesting permission before they spoke with their leader, saying, “Dear prince, may I speak?” Joining al-Qaeda meant taking a personal religious oath of allegiance to bin Laden, just as joining the Nazi Party had required swearing personal fealty to the Führer. So bin Laden’s group became just as much a hostage to its leader’s flawed strategic vision as the Nazis were to Hitler’s….

Between the Arab Spring and the death of bin Laden, it is hard to imagine greater blows to al-Qaeda’s ideology and organization. President Barack Obama has characterized al-Qaeda and its affiliates as “small men on the wrong side of history.” For al-Qaeda, that history just sped up, as bin Laden’s body floated down into the ocean deeps and its proper place in the unmarked grave of discarded lies.