It may be that we need occasionally to be reminded that Osama bin Laden started his career in terrorism as a client and ally of the United States, whom we used to stir up trouble in an Afghanistan occupied by the Soviet army. In the days of Presidents Reagan and Bush I, Osama, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, apparently could do no wrong. In those halcyon days no one referred to his supporters as "Islamofascists," despite the fact that they were as rigidly ideological then as they are now. Apparently the fact that they were our ideologues made all the difference.
I am sort of reminded of the age of my growing up and Southeast Asia. There we were faced by an implacably bitter enemy, the Viet Cong (South Vietnamese nationalists whom we referred to as Communists) and their allies the army of North Vietnam. After years of fighting, and ultimately the near-destruction of the Viet Cong, the Vietnamese {nationalist, communist} forces won the war. We were bitter about this for a long period — as bitter as we were almost thirty years earlier when the entrenched Washington bureaucracy in Harry Truman's State Department lost China (as though China were somehow ours to lose).
Cut to a few decades later, in each case. Our relationship with both China and Vietnam today can be described, I think, as carefully cordial; we have gotten over the horrible disappointments of the late forties and the mid seventies (and, in the case of Vietnam, they too seem to have gotten over the war, despite the fact that they had so much more than we did to get over). Today I got a copy of the magazine TEJO Tutmonde, the organ of the World Esperanto Youth Organization (TEJO). Pages 15-18 are devoted to this year's world Esperanto youth conference, which will be held from July 27 through August 3 in — guess where! — OK, you guessed it: Hanoi, Vietnam. And I suspect that there will be Americans present in the crowd during the conference.
All this makes me suspect that, if Osama bin Laden continues to survive for the next few years or decades, the tides of history will flow and ebb and change, and by 2030, 9/11 notwithstanding, he may once again be considered a good and faithful friend of the United States, unlikely as that may seem today. It all depends, of course, on who else we find to hate and fear in the interim.