Is Osama Winning?

As is suggested by Marc Lynch (“Watching al-Jazeera,” the Wilson Quarterly, summer 2005 ), the conversation began to end when US officials, after 9/11, “became so angry over the station’s coverage of al-Qaeda and the Afghanistan war that they stopped appearing on its programs—and thereby lost the opportunity to reach a vast audience.” Certainly, in hindsight, this was a critical error, a failure of diplomacy. As for those wistful for the post-World War II era, with the borders now closing, more security cameras being installed, and the rules changing, what could they say to the young girl on the streetcar except for “Osama won.”