The ten most influential people of the decade
Thursday, 24, Dec 2009 08:00
Who by their achievements and accomplishments, good or evil, had the most influence upon our world in the last ten years?
By Matthew Champion.
Click here to read the third most influential person of the last decade.
2 Osama Bin Laden
al-Qaida leader
One of the most jarring moments of the 2008 US presidential election was the way in which both candidates deliberately name-checked Osama Bin Laden during their campaign. John McCain told voters his administration would find Bin Laden, while Barack Obama said it would be among his priorities.
Politicians making such abstract promises appeared alien to the UK electorate, but it underlines the importance of the supposed founder of al-Qaida to the American people. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in 2001 that left 2,973 people dead it was revealed that capturing Bin Laden had been a priority for the previous administration of Bill Clinton. Fast forward to the end of the decade and no one is any closer to knowing where the Saudi is. Appearing before a Senate committee at the end of 2009, US secretary of defence Robert Gates said that no reliable information on Bin Laden's whereabouts had been received in years, but General Stanley McChrystal told the same committee that al-Qaida could never be defeated until its founder and leader was captured or killed.
Bin Laden has been on the FBI's list of ten most wanted fugitives since the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. A $50 million reward put out since September 11th for information leading to his capture or death has similarly failed to lead to either. Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari has raised the prospect that Bin Laden is dead and it may well be true. But until the west has proof of this it will continue to hunt him, for Bin Laden, a man so feared that the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to find him, is a beacon for pan-Islamic terrorism the world over.
He may not be the de facto leader of al-Qaida, he may not even be alive, but Bin Laden has arguably done more than any person this decade to change the daily lives of billions of people around the post-September 11th world he created.
Click here to read the most influential person of the last decade.