So, he is dead. Killed in a military raid on a mansion in Afghanistan. Shot in the side of the head and apparently not identifiable in the photos of his body. Buried at sea a day later. DNA samples are being sent off to be verified. Interesting. If it is Osama bin Laden, does that mean that the leader of terror is dead? Does that mean terror is dead? Probably not...
There was a book in 2006 called The Starfish and the Spider (http://www.starfishandspider.com/), all about the power of leaderless organizations. The idea is this. If you have an organization like a spider and you cut off a leg... the spider will survive. If you cut off the head, the spider will die. There is a very clear head in a spider-like organization. Get rid of it, and you've killed the organization. But then there is the organization that is more like a starfish. Cut off a leg of a starfish and... the original starfish will grow a new leg... In fact, in the face of predators, a starfish will often shed a leg... and then grow a new one. There is no "head" with a starfish... So in a starfish-like organization, like terror cells, well... you may have cut off a leg but a new one will grow back. There isn't one person who controls things... there are cells that take things on... There is power in a starfish-like organization...
So getting rid of Osama, while it might seem like a victory, isn't really anything like that. But time will tell....
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