When asked, "Tell us about Osama bin Laden and how important you think his personal capture would be. How thrilled are you going to be if you all leave office in '09 and he's still in a cave and the President's in Crawford?" the Secretary of State declared:
"Well, look, I would like nothing better to get the phone call that says we captured Osama bin Laden. I mean, in a sense, I think it’s, you know, it's a kind of issue of closure about-I was at the September 11 commemoration on Sunday and the one thing that did occur to me as I was talking to families as they came through is that, you know, I wish that there were more closure for what happened to us because what happened was that that launched a long war against terrorism, it launched a war to root out something that had been growing for a long time, and we're more at the beginning of that than at the end of it. And so I think in that sense it’s very important. And perhaps in terms of a kind of spiritual presence, philosophical presence in their movement, maybe it has—it probably has—but in terms of the operation itself, I've always argued, and I argued from the very beginning, and in fact, the fact that the President argues, reflected in his September 20 speech, we decided in that speech he'd only mention bin Laden once because nobody wanted to give the impression that this was about a single person."
Rice, a scholar of Soviet politics, also raised Marx in the context of al Qaeda.
"No, but I do listen to what they say is fueling their movement. Just like I used to read Karl Marx, I listen to what fuels their movement. And what fuels their movement is a clash, from their point of view, of civilization as we see it with the civilization that they wanted to build. What they do see, interestingly, is that Iraq is a central battle in that clash, which tells me that we’re exactly right that Iraq has to be won in that sense."
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Rice_compares_Al_Qaeda_to_Mar_0917.html