Bin Laden was tired of running, hiding and was over confident.

Listening to an interesting "expert" on the radio...

Explains that UBL of the 2002-2005 time frame truly WAS hiding in caves, changing locations DAILY. By 2005 UBL had resigned to living in a shack here and a farm there, hiding in villages and sometimes in population centers.

Within the last 2 years UBL had become overconfident and lazy with his own security... preferring to live the life of Royalty.






and that was a MISTAKE.

he was caught cause of an intense ivestigation that was pulled off

Many terrorists have managed to parlay the occupation into a position as government leader and, eventually, world-respected retired head-of-state. As the old joke from "Beyond The Fringe" put it about the first Kenyan president: "We originally thought he was a terrorist, but we were mistaken -- it turned out, he was actually a 'freedom fighter'."

Where ObL failed was that he wasn't a smart terrorist. A smart terrorist knows what goal he wants to achieve (generally, liberation of a country or region from foreign domination), a plan to get there, and an idea of how to use terror as a tactic -- and, just as importantly, when to pivot and drop terror in favor of "statesmanship." For example, even if Yasser Arafat can scarcely be said to have ended his life having achieved his goals (and certainly not the original PLO goal of driving the Israelis out of Palestine entirely), he did still manage to get a sizable chunk of the occupied territories restored to the control of the "Palestinian Authority" -- which may, eventually, become the Palestinian state for which he, in the end, agreed to settle. ObL, on the other hand, didn't have a well-defined goal (driving the infidel forces out of Arabia would have, in part, required the overthrow of the House of Saud in favor of himself as the new Arabian king, which he was disinclined to do), nor a plan to accomplish it (other than just "kill lots of Americans and their western allies"), nor, really, any way to make the pivot to statesmanship that a successful terrorist requires. The thing is, while political terrorists think through their plans, ObL was less a political terrorist than a religious zealot -- all he could do was get pissed-off at offenses to his religion, and spend a lot of money throwing a massive global temper-tantrum that resulted in the deaths of lots of innocent people, but gave him no way to transition to the statesman's role. The only plan he had was to kill a lot of westerners, start up a global "clash of civilizations"...and then hope that Allah would intercede on his behalf and grant victory to his side. And, as a lot of religious zealots have learned over the years, it's generally not a good bet to lay all your plans on an intercession from God when your side is vastly outnumbered and outgunned by your adversaries.

I have a slightly different take though. Was thinking about the man today and it occurred that he likely suffered an affliction common to the sons of rich men; a nagging, almost tormenting sense that he didn't deserve what he had (material wealth) and didn't have what he deserved (the love and admiration of his father) Remember that Bin Laden is somewhere in the middle of +70 children. At twenty three - an unformed mind and still a young adult - he was installed in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. He was defending his brethren against an invading force with the literal intent of annexing the land and eliminating his religion. In that struggle he found purpose and gained the love and admiration that his upbringing lacked. When the struggle was over however and the SU fell he faced a void that threatened to devour his new-found identity. So he did what many men have done when faced with the same situation - he read his former enemy into every new scenario he encountered, thereby protecting his neurotic ego identity.

I view OBL with the analogy of a house. Political causes were like the sheetrock, paint, interior mill-work and windows - they are the things that dress the basic structure. That structure itself - two by fours, floor joists, gables and exterior walls and roof - is radical Islam. This is to say that all of his causes and grievances were hung like decorations on his Jihadist framework. But both structure and dressing sit upon a foundation and that is his sense of ultra self-alienation, his neurotic ego-identity as I called it. Essentially the ultimate case of middle child syndrome. In a way I feel sad for the man.