Thus The Wall Street Journal today. “The Pentagon says US aircraft carried out a strike in Libya targeting a senior al-Qaeda commander, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who is accused of masterminding terrorist attacks across North Africa,” elaborates the newspaper. As ever, America mistakes individuals for socioeconomic phenomena. Hitler is thus mistaken for Nazi Germany, for example, and Stalin for Soviet atrocities. Leaders are important, no doubt, but the led are not far behind. In fact, they are deeply intertwined. Mistaking Osama bin Laden’s death for the end of al-Qaeda is the case in point. Whence this persistent fallacy in American thinking, though? I am ready to blame it all on Sigmund Freud and his predilection to delve into the psyche of the famous men and women of his time. The fallacy found fertile soil in America because of its abhorrence of all socioeconomic phenomena at the time. The country’s anticommunist stance added to the conceptual confusion. Returning to Belmokhtar, al-Qaeda will keep going without him just as it has kept going without bin Laden. And how. Forget Freud, America! It is the led who make leaders, not the other way around.