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    Recalling a forbidding figure of early authority in his Invisible Man , Ralph Ellison wrote that “whether we liked him or not, he was never out of our minds. That was a secret of leadership.” In reaction to a certain mode of flag-displaying faux national unity after the cataclysmic events of 11 September 2001, I wrote an article that proposed instead a sort of activist reticence that might be better designed for a long and arduous confrontation. In this attempt, I annexed a slogan that was adopted by some French citizens after the agonizing loss to Germany of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. “Always think of it: never speak of it.” Instead of grand proclamations about a “Global War on Terrorism,” or consoling but misleading injunctions from President Bush to consider “America” on the one hand and “the terrorists” on the other, it would be better to cultivate a low but intense flame, designed to burn indefinitely rather than to flare up, and directed not merely at the remorseless grinding-down of al-Qaeda as an organization but at its discredit ; at the steady, detailed refutation of Osama bin Laden’s false claim to ventriloquize the wretched of the earth. As a matter of work and habit I am a vocal person, so I cannot seriously claim to have kept literally to the second part of the injunction. But it did have the effect of ensuring that I thought about the founder and leader of al-Qaeda almost every day, and either read something about him or wrote something about him almost every month, very persistently over the next decade. And, now that he is dead, the requirement to reflect upon him has by no means been cancelled.
    It became a commonplace to say that “everything changed” on that brilliant fall morning in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Nobody’s life has been untouched. Onerous and risible travel restrictions, involving the collective punishment of the innocent, have had their impact at the level of banality. The decision of the Bush administration to try and prohibit real-time transmission of bin Laden’s video-sermons—lest they convey coded messages to “sleeper cells!”—tested ordinary definitions of stupidity as well as added to the aura of mystique, scope and potency that rapidly formed around his person. The decision to alter the balance of power in the Muslim world, and to forcibly replace the Taliban and Ba’ath Party despotisms in Afghanistan and Iraq, either was or was not the harbinger of the inspiring if vertiginous “Arab Spring” that burst out of such apparently unpromising soil in the opening months of 2011. On either interpretation, those interventions had momentous consequences that had not been foreseen by bin Laden, who had convinced himself and persuaded others that the United States no longer possessed the will to fight.
    I live in Washington and slightly knew one of the passengers who was flown into the outer walls of the Pentagon that morning. I’m also a frequent visitor to the television studios that have, as their picture-window backdrop, a commanding view of the United States Capitol. To this day, I seldom pass the Dome without trying and failing to imagine how it might have looked if another flight—United Airlines 93—had plunged into it: a contingency that was only a few minutes’ flying time away, and averted only by a heroic combat on the part of the passengers. This catastrophe for democracy would have been visible over the shoulders of the network anchors … The Dome is made of wrought iron and not, as many people suppose, out of marble. One has to picture molten metal obliterating that morning’s deliberations of Congress, and within a few yards of the Supreme Court and of the spacious Thomas Jefferson room of the Library of Congress. The long-planned aggression might have been, and was fully intended to be, very much worse than it was. Meanwhile, surveying the cloud of noxious dust and pulverized human remains that