Bin Laden, guerrilla warrior against the Russians in Afghanistan, campaigner against Riyadh sleaze, fulminating opponent of American influence in his region and implacable foe of Ariel Sharon (if he "is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush, then we are also men of peace"), is not some random icon to the backstreets of Baghdad and Damascus.
He is formidable, an image, a force. If you're looking for a British parallel, though their policies have nothing in common, the politician he most reminds me of is radical former Labour minister Tony Benn, convincing as always about a golden past that has been betrayed, unveiling statistical amazements and historical myths with equal facility, always seeming safe within a cocoon of certitude.
And American politicians? US President George W. Bush himself, the matching crusader, stands out from a born-again pack.
Could bin Laden, like so many terrorists before him, be drawn into some kind of deal?
It's impossible, not because the man himself couldn't wheel and deal (if you chart his varying degrees of denial over 9/11 or Dar or Nairobi, you see a trimmer in a jam, a negotiator in search of a bargain), but because he has nothing to offer his foes.
You might just construct a "peace plan" where the Riyadh regime changed, Israel was pinned back to its earliest borders and the US army went home, but nobody who matters would be interested. This is a fight to the end, Osama's end. The only real question is how his legend will live.
The problem, as Lawrence says, is that bin Laden has no vision of the society he would wish to create, apart from a few thin riffs on Mullah Omar's Afghanistan.
He merely wants to blow the house down or up. His is a "narrow, limited creed." The lads who flock to his banner would soon grow restless if they had to live in Osamaland on "scriptural dictates, poetic transports and binary prescriptions."
Then the breakfast TV grillings from Frost of Arabia would be tough, not deferential.
But none of that will ever happen. We have only a fleeting, romantic horseman of the apocalypse high on some mountain skyline, a prophet in the mists. Such legends, alas, do live.
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