He is right about one thing. Getting Bin Laden would help more than any other strategy or policy. He is the spiritual leader of a group of people who think in slogans and act with bullets.
Not noted for intellectual endeavors these people rely on cunning and claims of religious superiority to seize power in a brutal way.
Get the head and you create a problem of who will be the new leader and why.
Speaking of which, Bin Laden's corpse has been silent lately.
No, this is a many headed snake, he dies, someone else rises to the top. It would be GREAT to kill him, simply because Justice cries out for it, but there is no, nor was there ever, an "easy" way to win this, this is going to be a long, tough slog, as the President has always maintained. We either have the stomach for it, or we dont, and in that case, we'd better start writing our own eulogies.
Heavy emphasis on 'spirit.' Six years of 'spirit.'
That is a fatal misunderstanding of the roots and the leaders in Al Queda, and in similar groups. Osama, while not figured head, while quite a dominant and commanding presence was none of those things because of who he was, but because of what he said, what he was willing to do to put his beliefs into action, and who was willing to back him up with money.
There is no shortage of such individuals in Al Queda now, nor was there one in the past, nor will there be one in the future. I have no belief that 9/11 required Osama bin Laden alive at the time. It, or an equally bold and deadly event would have been achieved by Al Queda by that time if not soon thereafter, with or without Osama bin Laden.
Killing Osama will change nothing, in fact he is more valuable to us alive and required to fight us now, with us actively fighting back, in every WOT theatre in the world. Dead he would rise within radical Islam due to the near-myth status the west has created for him; because the world would see that his death changed nothing.