Dark facial hair isn't mandatory, but it adds to the aura of intrigue. The eyes may be hard-set and smoldering, like the Ayatollah Khomeini's, or soulful and sensitive, like Che Guevara's. Typically, only a few murky biographical details are known, leaving rumor and legend to fill in the gaps.
But the most crucial trait for any bogeyman of U.S. foreign policy is elusiveness, a protean quality that's both physical and almost metaphysical. It's what can turn a rogue dictator, rebel commander or head of a sub rosa terrorist network into a mass-media emblem, an international symbol who provokes revulsion in some, adulation in others.
So it is with Osama bin Laden, a man who is lionized in some parts of the Islamic world but condemned by most Americans for the murder of more than 6,000 of their fellow citizens in the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Though no proof has yet been made public of his involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, Bin Laden has quickly become the glowering personification of global terrorism, summoning intense feelings of anger, hatred and anxiety, as well as a gathering fascination.
"We're turning him into a kind of icon of evil," says Richard E. Rubenstein, a professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Virginia, and author of "Alchemists of Revolution--Terrorism in the Modern World."
The preoccupation with Bin Laden may result in part from the void of new reliable information about him. Only a handful of Western journalists ever has interviewed him, and with the world bracing for warfare, his movements and motivations can only be guessed at by most people.
The 44-year-old exile's rise to international celebrity is both revealing and disturbing, some foreign policy analysts and cultural observers say. By focusing so intently on Bin Laden, America may be oversimplifying complex geopolitical issues and forsaking a process of slow, deliberative fact-gathering for a form of ritualized myth-making. The Bin Laden phenomenon, some argue, reduces the aspirations and grievances of millions of Muslims around the world to a psychological mug shot of just one man.
"The consequence of paying too much attention to this guy is that you're not focusing on the real threat and you're missing potential other threats," says British journalist Simon Reeve, author of "The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism" (1999). "Bin Laden is one part of a bigger picture. He's one element of a group that is threatening the West now. The problem will not go away if Bin Laden is attacked, arrested or imprisoned. Quite the opposite, in fact."
