Osama bin Laden was all about image. With his body decomposing somewhere on the bottom of the Arabian Sea, the remaining question is what image of him will be the lasting one. In life he tried to mythologize his own image, and in death, the forces that killed him are trying to tear that myth down as well.
Whenever we think of major historical figures, our memories are profoundly shaped by how they made their exit. The public last remembers Marilyn Monroe in her prime as a world-famous sex symbol. Her untimely death seared that image of her into our shared consciousness. Elizabeth Taylor, on the other hand, was fully Monroe’s equal in her own time. Taylor died just this year, though, and now we cannot help thinking of her old and faded, making rare public appearances in a wheelchair. In the same way, we lionize John F. Kennedy as the hero of Camelot, while his brother Ted lived many more decades exposed as all too human. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. probably had more cultural power as a martyr than as a flesh and blood man.
Osama bin Laden self-consciously cultivated the image of an ascetic warrior for jihad, wearing flowing robes and living simply in the mountains—like “Gandalf wandering the frontier” as Jon Stewart put it. His followers believed him to be divinely protected—believed that he simply couldn’t be killed. He was cornered at Tora Bora in the opening months of the war, but then vanished, seemingly into thin air. Every time the United States heard rumors of his death, he appeared in another video, smiling into a camera and taunting America for its ineptitude. Again and again over these nine long years, American spy chiefs were forced to glumly acknowledge that the trail had gone cold. No one saw him. No one spoke with him directly. Even to his followers, he was more myth than reality—the myth of the survivor, proudly spiting America just by surviving
Demythologizing bin Laden is even worse for him than killing him. Word that he was living in quiet luxury far from the fighting will be far more damaging to his legacy than the bullets fired by our Navy SEALs. The President’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan was right on the money that it shows “how false his narrative has been over the years.” Releasing even one photo of his end would visually set the grisly truth against the myth that bin Laden built for himself. It’s not something America doesn’t do. It’s something we’ve done repeatedly and successfully in the past.
It worked wonders for the highest-ranking terrorist we’d gotten before bin Laden. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was one of the most feared and respected terrorists in al-Qaeda. After the the kidnapping and internet beheading of a Wall Street Journal bureau chief in 2002, the killing was posted on the internet, titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. It was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who crowed: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl … there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.” When he was captured, the United States released those famous mugshots. They showed the world not a terrifying and elusive instrument of jihad, but a disheveled man in a loose fitting t-shirt—looking for all the world like porn star Ron Jeremy worse for the wear after a night of clubbing. That, combined with with his loose-lipped confessions, forever destroyed the mystique of the righteous Jew-killer.
Much the same went for Saddam Hussein, his sons Uday and Qusay, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The photos of Hussein in the spider hole showed more viscerally and immediately than any written account the truth of what had happened—the famously vain dictator of Iraq, dirty and afraid, as American doctors checked his tangled beard for vermin. This photograph probably did more to deconstruct the image he had spent thirty years crafting than all the statue-topplings combined. al-Zarqawi, meanwhile, was another legendary kidnapper most famous for the taped beheading of Nick Berg with a machete. The photos of al-Zarqawi dead after a US airstrike ensured that the last, enduring images the Iraqi public would see of him were of that fearsome executioner finally defeated.
Now, even after the raid that killed bin Laden and members of his family, the last images the world has of him are of the heroic and defiant jihadist that he made himself out to be. A picture of him shot in the head, lying on the floor of his suburban mansion, gruesome though it may be, would change that. It would be disseminated virally throughout the Muslim world, where a significant minority still admires him, and would stick in the minds of even those who’d prefer to think that he cheated death one more time.
If the administration really did a thorough study and concluded that the risks to our troops were too high, I can’t argue with that. But I fear the decision to withhold this photograph centers and hazier worries about “spiking the football.” It wouldn’t be. Shattering the myth of Osama bin Laden’s life is even more important than ending the life itself.
John-Clark Levin is the winner of the 2010 Eric Breindel Collegiate Journalism Award, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Daily Caller, and other publications. He is a contributor to the Student Free Press Association.
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