Page 2 of 2 THE ROVING
EYE Sheikh Osama and the iPod general
By Pepe Escobar
remain stable, or may be actually
rising, contrary to the general's optimistic
numbers. Iraq averages 62 violent deaths a day,
compared with 37 last year. There were no fewer
than 1,809 civilian deaths last month. The "surge"
has led to the acceleration of ethnic cleansing,
and with no fewer than 100,000 Iraqis fleeing the
country every single month, according to the Iraqi
Red Crescent, there are fewer and fewer people to
kill on the ground. During the "surge", 20 times
as many people are leaving the
country as before it began at
the start of the year.
In his long-awaited
close-up for the cameras in Congress, Petraeus did
not say a word about the appalling living
conditions in Iraq, or about the more than 4
million killed, exiled or now living as refugees.
He did not say that now, on the sixth anniversary
of September 11, the US opens its spanking-new,
42-hectare, US$592 million embassy, fortress
rather, in Baghdad, almost as big as the Vatican,
built by 3,500 people (mostly imported from
Kuwait) over three years, complete with 27
bomb-proof buildings, underground bunkers, leisure
and entertainment centers, beauty parlors, a gym,
a swimming pool and a club.
Symbols don't
come more pregnant with meaning than this: and
this one spells, "We rule, and we're not gonna
leave, ever." As for a real drawdown of troops,
not a word amid the current show to (not) amuse
the galleries.
Make Islam, not war As for bin Laden's progress report on the "war
on terror", it reads like a wacky remixed version
of Karl Marx' and Friedrich Engels' The
Communist Manifesto - all the more striking as
it cuts through the neo-con-promoted atmosphere of
fear in the US prior to a possibly tactical
nuclear, illegal, preemptive attack on Iran.
Bin Laden quotes everything from the Holy
Koran to Noam Chomsky to illustrate his take on
the irreversible decline of the American empire
and to develop his critique of globalized capital,
including the mention that "life of all of mankind
is in danger because of the global warming
resulting to a large degree from the emissions of
the factories of the major corporations".
This time he didn't need a Kalashnikov as
a prop, or to dwell once again on "Christian and
Jewish crusaders" or the occupation of the "land
of the two holy mosques" (Mecca and Medina). After
all, Islamist jihad of the al-Qaeda mold is slowly
reaching one of its key objectives, which is the
overthrow of infidel, secularist governments in
Islamic lands.
A major goal of bin Laden
has been to depose the House of Saud. He's getting
there. He already has the Americans out of
military bases in Saudi Arabia. The secularist
Assad dynasty in Syria might also be replaced
sooner rather than later by a Muslim
Brotherhood-dominated government. And best of all,
the Americans got rid of secularist infidel Saddam
for him.
The solution for the planet's
ills, according to the theocratic sheikh, is to
"embrace Islam". It's as if he had felt the urge
to coin a new slogan: "Make Islam, not war." US
public opinion, the anti-war movement included,
obviously will not buy it. But his key target
audience - the middle and lower middle classes and
urban proletariat all over Muslim lands in the
Middle East, North Africa and Asia - may, as they
have already identified, and felt in their skin,
all the sorrows provoked by corporate-driven
globalization.
It's as if bin Laden - in
tune with great swaths of world public opinion -
already sees on the horizon the dust storms
unleashed by the shattering US defeats in both
Iraq and Afghanistan, and is deeply engaged,
according to his and Ayman al-Zawahiri's strategy,
in transforming al-Qaeda from a sect into a global
protest movement.
Those who will
definitely pay a lot of attention to bin Laden's
words are young, second-generation Muslims or
migrant, refugee, converted Muslims born in
western Europe, "socially mutating tribes" as
French expert on Islam Olivier Roy would put it,
all of them ultra-radicalized anti-globalizers for
whom al-Qaeda is a true anti-globalization
revolutionary movement.
They are
definitely not Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis,
Afghans and Iranians - all of these not giving a
damn about pan-Islamism, as they are engaged in
much more complex, localized national struggles.
Once again, it's important to stress the
nonsense of the neo-con-coined "Islamo-fascist
totalitarianism" label. In Black Mass, his
latest book, a professor of European thought at
the London School of Economics, John Gray,
correctly describes radical Islam of the al-Qaeda
mold as Islamo-Jacobinism: "Their closest affinity
is with the illiberal theory of popular
sovereignty expounded by [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau
and applied by [Maximilien] Robespierre in the
French Terror." Bin Laden may be now expounding in
full a modern revolutionary ideology, but he is
still the leader, as Gray would define it, of "a
millenarian movement with Islamic roots".
The whole question around the face-off of
the year is not how Petraeus will "save" the
US$3-billion-a-week Bush war on Iraq. The question
is why bin Laden felt so relaxed as to stage a
comeback as statesman/strategist to proclaim,
among other things, the utter failure of the
Bush-conducted imperial project.
The
answer is because Bush and the neo-cons have been
playing al-Qaeda's game all along. Had Petraeus
been sent six years ago on a thorough
counterinsurgency mission to smash al-Qaeda,
Congress today would be grappling with really
relevant issues, such as health, education, the
erosion of American workers' salaries and yes,
global warming. Forget Petraeus: someone in
Hollywood better call Bruce Willis to fight and
kill the sheikh in Die Hard 5.
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