Osama bin Laden: Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

The familiar, expressionless countenance of Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, has occupied a slot on the F.B.I’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for nearly a year now. He gazes out from the upper left-hand corner, looking less like a terrorist than one of the B-list celebrities on Hollywood Squares.

George W. Bush probably wishes he could bump Osama down and over a few squares, perhaps to Carlos the Jackal’s old chair. For not only is Osama far from being apprehended and thus dismissed from the list, U.S. intelligence sources admit they don’t have a clue where he is or even if he’s dead or alive -- a fact that so embarrasses Washington the messages coming from the administration are increasingly schizoid.

"I truly am not concerned about him," Bush said in March; a dramatic reversal from his avowal only five months earlier that he wouldn’t rest until he had bin Laden’s head on a platter. And only a week or so after Bush declared bin Laden washed-up, CIA director George Tenet called him an "immediate and serious threat."

According to the information on his fugitive page, Osama bin Laden "is left-handed and walks with a cane," is tall and thin, and his occupation is unknown (apparently the F.B.I. does not consider "terrorist" a career choice). He goes by many aliases: the Prince, the Emir, Hajj, and the Director.

This last moniker has proved eerily accurate; dead or alive, missing or found, bin Laden is the unwitting author of Bush’s global war on terrorism: a drama with an ever-changing script.

A manhunt that began energetically, ringing with grand if hackneyed rhetoric, dissolved in finger pointing after it became clear that bureaucratic bungling and reliance on flaky tribal chieftains were probably what allowed Osama to abscond during the Tora Bora siege.

Afghan warlord Hazret Ali, who was an ally of the U.S. (at the time), told the BBC that, "Osama, as far as I knew, was at the battle at Tora Bora. ... One of the prisoners who was captured told us that he saw him with his own eyes." He went on to say that in his opinion there was something fishy about Osama’s abrupt disappearance from the scene. "I cannot point to anyone but I think there was some kind of dishonesty."

Illustrating the pinnacle of U.S. military intelligence and leaving no syntactical stone unturned, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "He’s either dead in some tunnel or he’s alive. And if he’s alive, he’s either in Afghanistan or he isn’t."

The State Department proudly announced its international bounty of $25 million for Osama’s capture -- an absurd sum of money that went over like a bomb in Afghanistan, where the offer of a herd of goats would have made a lot more sense to the rural villagers.

As bin Laden’s trail grew cold and leads dried up, it began to dawn on the Bush Administration that making Osama bin Laden the bellwether for the war on terrorism might have been a mistake. So Bush chose a handful of countries he already considered a pain in the ass, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and labeled them the Axis of Evil -- evil being, as Charles Paul Freund pointed out on Reason, "the foundational thesis" of the Bush presidency. The Axis soon doubled to accommodate several more countries that were a bug in Bush’s bonnet: Libya, Cuba and Syria.

As the incarnation of evil, however, the Axis has been found sorely wanting. You can’t put the Axis’s photo on a Wanted poster. There’s certainly no room in the Top Ten list for a hulking Axis, and who would play the Axis in the movie version of its life?

Poor Colin Powell is clearly weary of "the OBL question." It must aggravate him to no end that one misplaced terrorist diverts attention away from the war on terror’s many successes. Besides blasting the Taliban to smithereens in Afghanistan, he repeatedly points out, the U.S. has "detained a number of individuals" and "rounded up a number of al-Qaeda organizational leaders." But the American public and the media aren’t interested in a bunch of middle management al-Qaeda schmucks, and their initial passion for all the rounding up, detaining and interrogating has cooled. They want the evildoer.