How Bouazizi killed Bin Laden

It was the US in airstrike which brought about Bin Laden's physical death. But it was the thousands of youths who overthrew Mubarak, Ben Ali, liberated half of Libya from Gaddafi and who are being slaughtered in Syria who have decreed Bin Laden's irrelevance.

It was the Jasmine revolution which debunked  the racist and 'orientalist' stereotype propagated by both western governments and  Al Qaeda,  that the only alternative to Arab dictators is backward looking islamic fundamentalism

I am not saying that political Islam will not play an important role in the next decades, probably becoming similar to Turkey's moderate AK brand in the process. Neither am I saying that democracy will be a plane sailing affair.

Probably like the European revolutionaries of 1848, the Tahrir square generation will not see their dream accomplished in their life time. And the dangers of counter revolution  lurk in every corner. But in the long term the jasmine revolution had a more fundamental role than Bin Laden in the development of Arab societies.

In reality Osama Bin Laden's physical death does not change much on the ground. For he was more of a  brand name for a franchise composed of unconnected cells rather than the universal mastermind of terror depicted in US propaganda.

But irrelevance is a far greater danger for the Bin Laden brand. What's sure is that Bin Laden did not succeed in toppling any Arab regime and replacing it with a caliphate.  Instead history was made by a movement which embraced a discourse of democracy. In the absence of such a movement, a dead Bin Laden could have been even more dangerous.

Fundamentally Bin Laden was not  just an enemy of the US, but the extreme right wing of Arab reaction; an enemy of Arab democracy and modernisation. He spoke about the restoration of a mythical caliphate i.e. absolute power by a theocracy. He was a reactionary who fought for the regression of Arab  and Islamic societies. In many ways he thrived on the ashes left of Arab socialism which fueled much hope in the 1960s but created the basis of autocratic terror in later decades.

Some have compared the physical elimination of Bin Laden by the US  to Dr. Frankenstein destroying his creation alluding to US support for Afghan insurgents against Soviet occupation. Probably this support did not amount to a direct connection between Bin Laden and the US.

What is sure is that the US policy of propping up corrupt and dictatorial regimes in North Africa and the middle east helped bin laden find new recruits. So did the farming out of torture which gave a free hand to the regimes to use brutality against their people with the excuse of the war on terror. No wonder Gaddafi and Assad have tried to use Al Qaeda as an excuse for their violent crackdown in the past weeks.

So did the invasion of Iraq on the wrong pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction. Probably had there been no intervention in 2003, the Iraqis would have had their own jasmine revolution. Even if judging by Saddam's brutality, western intervention would still have been necessary to prevent a bloodbath, the alternative to Saddam would have come directly from the people and not imposed by an occupation.

Another advert for the Bin Laden franchise remains the occupation of Palestine. But one must say that except for a small isolated minority  Palestinians never embraced Al Qaeda's brand of political Islam.

Even Hamas is engaged in a savage war against these elements. This is why I was surprised when a Hamas spokesperson proclaimed Bin Laden a 'holy warrior' and condemned the US strike against him. By doing so Hamas continues to play in to the hands of those right wing Israelis who oppose peace. Probably the one common thing between Hamas and Al Qaeda is that they are both threatened by the popular rebellions which are sweeping the Arab world.

Finally the future of the Bin Laden franchise depends on whether the US and the west have learned their lesson. If they go back to the bad old ways of supporting autocrats, Bin Laden will rise back from the ashes.

If the west and Europe in particular, offer a prospect of prosperity to the budding Arab democracies.  But Bin Laden remains a force to be reckoned with in Pakistan where Islamism was cultivated by a US backed military establishment since the Zia ul Haq's  coup against the elder Bhutto. But that is another story....