On the other hand,
Lawrence Kaplan warns against the American inclination to invest too much meaning into the death of any single bogeyman:
From Kaiser Wilhelm on, and for reasons that respond to needs unrelated to national security as such, we've always pinned the blame (and credit) for mass movements on their most visible spokesmen. Tojo, Milosevic, Saddam, and, on the flipside, Yeltsin or Aristide--George Kennan was right to lament the power of the bogeyman in American foreign policy. The persistence of nasty and divisive political impulses runs counter to our progress narrative, and also tends to be more difficult to explain. Rather, in accounting for the obduracy of certain countries and ideologies, presidents have advanced the proposition that, were it not for a handful of men like Saddam Hussein, the late Mohamed Farah Aideed, and Osama bin Laden, their supporters would eagerly sign on to the American program. "You think the Germans would have perpetrated the Holocaust on their own without Hitler?" President Clinton asked in reference to the bestial conduct of the Serbs in Kosovo. "Political leaders do this kind of thing."