Osama bin Laden: Dead and buried.

It’s not a headline I ever expected to wake up to. Of late I had even begun to wonder whether he was anyway some kind of composite figure. That’s the intrigue of the unseen enemy – he is so easily contorted into whatever you want to make him.

Is he alive/dead/figment of our imagination? But then in the end he was always more “inspirational” than “active”.

Hence his death, even though he has clearly been inactive in recent years beyond a few audio messages, is structurally important. He was a totem for many for whom he was seen as the enemy of their oppression. For the rest, he was a divisive hate figure who polarised communities across the world.

But when I stood amongst the heaving crowds of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, never the word Osama, bin, nor Laden was ever present – in voice or in written slogan. Osama did not drive the Arab Spring – he was no part of it anywhere.Did the appalling achievement of 9/11 elevate him to a false pedestal of capacity? Almost certainly. His presence in the world has distorted global relationships for two decades. There is no iconic successor to lead what was already a fading movement.

So what now? Pakistan is bound to upheave. Prime Minister Zadari only clung to power courtesy of a patched up deal in the past few days with Musharraf’s Party. He will be personally hugely vulnerable – locally and internationally.

After all, here was Osama holed up in a vast unexplained security compound half a mile from the Pakistani equivalent of  Sandhurst. Structural elements of Pakistan surely must have known he was there. Structural elements of a country with whom we enjoy friendly relations. Was he protected?

Obama too will be more vulnerable in a security sense. But today he was all but re-elected to be the next President of the United States. Osama is dead. The purpose of the Afghan war is done. Even if at the most terrible cost and what is bound to be a long-lasting and unstable aftermath. And Al Qaeda‘s rump? It will attempt a firework display of nasty action – perhaps.

But Osama’s gauntlet still clenches in death. From Bolton to Baghdad, from Düsseldorf to Mumbai, political and community leaders have a vast job on their hands. The challenge now to reach out to the alienated peoples who found in Osama hope and leadership. His fundamentalism feasted on inequality, poverty and hypocrisy.

The Arab Spring will not neutralise these issues in a very long time. The opposition to the Arab spring, rooted in Saudi Arabia, continues to fund Wahabi-ist fundamentalism in schools, madrassas and mosques in Europe and across the developing world.. Great oil wealth vested in a few mediaeval hands continues to spawn the strain of fundamentalism upon which one rich Saudi, Osama Bin Laden lived and died.

The gaping sore that is 9/11 in the American psyche remains unhealed.

We who covered the co-ordinated attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington underestimated how deep, how searing, and how long lasting this event would prove to be.

Today this secular nation, whose refusal to either favour or move against any religion is enshrined in the constitution, is now at war with itself over whether a mosque and Islamic cultural centre should be built some two blocs away from Ground Zero.

Last week the Pew polling organisation in the United States revealed that the number of Americans who now believe Barack Obama to be a Muslim has risen from 11 per cent last year to 18 per cent today.

Add to all this, mass unemployment on a scale not seen in America since the 1930s and one is tempted to understand how this extraordinary entity that is America is seen by many to be talking itself into a double dip financial crisis.

To have been on the beach in America these past weeks, absorbing the New York Times and a lot of political back chatter, is to have seen elements of a society riven with a kind of collective nervous breakdown.

The end of the war in Iraq (is it really?); the disputed possibility of troop reductions in Afghanistan, emphasise how little the remedial military response to 9/11 has done to calm the nerves at home.

And yet when, last week, China finally overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, to hear it in America, anyone would think the US would itself be thus overwhelmed. It took sage economists to point out that the US economy is still fourteen times that of China.

What America really seems to miss is what many have come round to praising Britain for – a coalition government. Many thought Obama might be it. Alas the limits of power and perhaps his own inexperience have rendered a period of some of the most partisan division in US modern political history.

Every time I met a politically connected or motivated American on the beach, the question was the same – coalition, how does it work, what does it take, and what does it say of Cameron and Clegg?

What might otherwise be regarded as an incredible feat of engineering has been achieved a mile under the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.

As of this moment, it LOOKS as if BP has finally managed to lower and secure a completely sealed cap on to the three month old gush of oil.

The more we learn about ‘deep sea, off shore’ drilling, the more miraculous the entire saga becomes.

Miraculous that man, without line of sight and with the vicissitudes of currents and ocean swirls, can so direct remote robotic actions that a seventy ton cap can be dropped upon so active a volcano of oil, secured and sealed to a flexible outflow to conduct the gush in a controlled flush to boats anchored on the surface. 

Yet it is today’s ‘miraculous’ engineering capacity that got BP into trouble in the first place – a conviction that they had a fail-safe mechanism to explore and retrieve oil from depths never plumbed before.

As America struggles to break its previously unquenchable dependence upon countries with questionable regimes in the Middle East, let’s make no mistake, BP represented to the archangel of hope.

‘Drill baby drill!’, was Sarah Palin’s cry which I heard for myself at the last Republican Convention.

Barack Obama’s unease about coastal drilling bowed in the face of the post Iraq War need to slash those Arab oil imports.

But what we never knew was that all this drilling depended upon one ‘fail-safe’ piece of technology which had ‘never previously failed’.

Had we known then that we were one valve, one washer, one O ring from disaster would we have drilled baby?

When Channel 4 News was reporting from Brazil at the end of last year, we devoted much attention to the new and potentially life changing finds of oil off Rio.

They are two thousand feet DEEPER than the reserves off Louisiana.

At what point will the world conclude that seven thousand feet, five thousand feet, any thousand feet below the sea’s surface is too deep?

That in effect those stocks are non-stocks and that the need to find an alternative right now, is with us?

Presumably only when demand outstrips supply, will our drugged dependence on oil ever be broken, by science coming up with a more sustainable alternative.

The question now is whether that moment could be artificially fixed by a globally agreed moratorium that draws the line on deep sea drilling.