Middle East response to bin Laden muted

BEIRUT -- A decade ago, the Middle East might have responded to the killing of Osama bin Laden with fury at the United States. But with the region convulsed by mostly peaceful popular revolutions, the response to his death has been muted, another signal that the old Arab order is being swept away.

For this new generation, Mohammed Bouazizi -- the young Tunisian who set himself on fire, spurring the revolution that ousted dictator President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali earlier this year -- is a bigger hero than bin Laden, whose vision of martyrdom and jihad has been replaced by more prosaic aspirations such as free elections, good governance and an end to corruption.

"You will see protests for freedom and democracy, yes. But for Osama bin Laden? Definitely not," said Mustafa Alani, director of the Security and Terrorism Studies Program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai.

In the Arab world, he said, al-Qaida was "already dying."

The news of the death of the world's most famous Arab prompted some loud anti-American voices. The Muslim Brotherhood called for the United States to withdraw from the region now that its chief foe was eliminated, and in the Gaza Strip, the Hamas movement condemned the killing, praising bin Laden as "an Arab and Muslim warrior."

The region remains home to powerful strains of Islamist extremism, able to inflict great damage, even if their followers are relatively few in number.

But for many, bin Laden was as much a part of the old Arab order as the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia who were swept away by the populist clamor for change earlier this year, along with the other leaders in Syria, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere who are battling for their political lives against a groundswell of unrest.

"The timing of Osama bin Laden's death has just been perfect," said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a professor of political science at Emirates University. "Osama was one of the leaders -- an inspiration to some -- that were behind the misery, defeats and stagnation that the Arab world has been going through."

Now, he said, "his death adds to the modern, moderate and democratic Arab world that is currently in the making."

Al-Qaida's fading allure was a trend discernible long before the protests began sweeping through the region at the beginning of the year. It was perhaps most noticeable in Iraq, where Sunnis turned against the al-Qaida in Iraq insurgents holding sway in their neighborhoods in 2006 and formed the Awakening movement, joining U.S. troops to almost, but not quite, defeat the extremists.

The youth-led revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia crystallized the irrelevance of al-Qaida and its extremist aspirations "because they achieved so much more than al-Qaida ever achieved," said Kamal Habib, a former member of the extremist Islamic Jihad movement in Egypt who now researches Islamist politics.