DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Osama bin Laden's American
legacy By Tom Engelhardt
Back in the 1960s, senator George Aiken of
Vermont offered two American presidents a plan for
dealing with the Vietnam War: declare victory and
go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it's a plan
worth considering again today for a war in
Afghanistan and Pakistan now in its tenth year.
As everybody not blind, deaf and dumb
knows by now, Osama bin Laden has been eliminated.
Literally. By Navy Seals. Or as one of a crowd of
revelers who appeared in front of the White House
on Sunday night put it on an impromptu sign
riffing on The Wizard of Oz: "Ding, Dong, Bin
Laden Is Dead."
And wouldn't it be easy if
he had indeed been the Wicked Witch
of the West and all we needed
to do was click those ruby slippers three times,
say "there's no place like home" and be back in
Kansas. Or if this were V-J day and a sailor's
kiss said it all.
Unfortunately, in every
way that matters for Americans, it's an illusion
that Bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters,
he will fight on, barring a major Barack Obama
administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and
it's we who will ensure that he remains on the
battlefield that George W Bush's administration
once so grandiosely labeled the global "war on
terror".
Admittedly, the Arab world had
largely left Bin Laden in the dust even before he
took that bullet to the head. There, the focus was
on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely
non-violent protests that have shaken the region
and its autocrats to their roots. In that part of
the world, his death is, as Tony Karon of Time
Magazine has written, "Little more than a
historical footnote," and his dreams are now
essentially meaningless.
Consider it an
insult to irony, but the world Bin Laden really
changed forever wasn't in the Greater Middle East.
It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea,
don't release any photos, and he'll still carry on
as a ghost as long as Washington continues to
fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old
neighborhood.
The Tao of terrorism If analogies to The Wizard of Oz were in
order, bin Laden might better be compared to that
film's wizard rather than the wicked witch. After
all, he was, in a sense, a small man behind a vast
screen on which his frail frame took on, in the
US, the hulking proportions of a super villain, if
not a rival superpower.
In actuality,
al-Qaeda, his organization, was, at best, a ragtag
crew that, even in its heyday, even before it was
embattled and on the run, had the most limited of
operational capabilities. Yes, it could mount
spectacular and spectacularly murderous actions,
but only one of them every year or two.
Bin Laden was never "Hitler", nor were his
henchmen the Nazis, nor did they add up to Joseph
Stalin and his minions, though sometimes they were
billed as such. The nearest thing al-Qaeda had to
a state was the impoverished, ravaged,
Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan where some
of its "camps" were once sheltered.
Even
the money available to Bin Laden, while
significant, wasn't much to brag about, not on a
superpower scale anyway. The 9/11 attacks were
estimated to cost $400,000 to $500,000, which in
superpower terms was pure chump change.
Despite the apocalyptic look of the
destruction Bin Laden's followers caused in New
York and at the Pentagon, he and his crew of
killers represented a relatively modest,
distinctly non-world-ending challenge to the US.
And had the Bush administration focused the same
energies on hunting him down that it put into
invading and occupying Afghanistan and then Iraq,
can there be any question that almost 10 years
wouldn't have passed before he died or, as will
now never happen, was brought to trial?
It
was our misfortune and Bin Laden's good luck that
Washington's dreams were not those of a global
policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation
to justice, but of an imperial power whose leaders
wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet
into a Pax Americana for decades to come. So if
you're writing Bin Laden's obituary right now,
describe him as a wizard who used the 9/11 attacks
to magnify his meager powers many times over.
After all, while he only had the ability
to launch major operations every couple of years,
Washington - with almost unlimited amounts of
money, weapons and troops at its command - was
capable of launching operations every day. In a
sense, after 9/11, Bin Laden commanded Washington
by taking possession of its deepest fears and
desires, the way a bot takes over a computer, and
turning them to his own ends.
It was he,
thanks to 9/11, who insured that the invasion and
occupation of Afghanistan would be put into
motion. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who also
insured that the invasion and occupation of Iraq
would be launched. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who
brought America's Afghan war to Pakistan, and
American aircraft, bombs, and missiles to Somalia
and Yemen to fight that "war on terror".
And for the past near-decade, he did all
this the way a Tai Chi master fights: using not
his own minimal strength, but our massive
destructive power to create the sort of mayhem in
which he undoubtedly imagined that an organization
like his could thrive. Don't be surprised,
then, that in these past months or even years, Bin
Laden seems to have been sequestered in a walled
compound in a resort area just north of the
Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to
nothing. Think of him as practicing the Tao of
terrorism. In fact, the less he did, the fewer
operations he was capable of launching, the more
the American military did for him in creating what
collapsing Chinese dynasties used to call "chaos
under heaven".
Dead and alive As is now obvious, Bin Laden's greatest
wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab
world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen
to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral
and unimportant.
He helped open us up to
all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves
(and others) - from torture and the creation of an
offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking
down of our own American world, where we were to
cower in terror, while lashing out militarily.
In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but
in the months and years after. As a result, if we
don't have the sense to follow Aiken's advice, the
wars we continue to fight with disastrous results
will prove to be his monument, and our imperial
graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than
one empire in the past).
At a moment when
the media and celebratory American crowds are
suddenly bullish on US military operations, we
still have almost 100,000 American troops, 50,000
allied troops, startling numbers of armed
mercenaries, and at least 400 military bases in
Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as
part of an endless war against one man and his
organization which, according to the Central
Intelligence Agency director, is supposed to have
only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.
Now, he's officially under the waves. In
the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing
future "caliphate" was the most ephemeral of
fantasies. In a sense, though, his dominion was
always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He
possessed us.
When the celebrations and
partying over his death fade, as they will no less
quickly than did those for Britain's royal
wedding, we'll once again be left with the
tattered American world Bin Laden willed us, and
it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing
this "victory", his killing, is almost 10 years
later.
For all the print devoted to the
operation that took him out, all the talking heads
chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished
on American special ops forces, the president, his
planners, and various intelligence outfits, this
is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything,
we should probably be in mourning for what we
buried long before we had Bin Laden's body, for
what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed)
to goad us into doing to ourselves, and what, in
the course of that, we did, in the name of
fighting him, to others.
Those chants of
"USA! USA!" on the announcement of his death were
but faint echoes of the ones at Ground Zero on
September 14, 2001, when president George W Bush
picked up a bullhorn and promised "the people who
knocked these buildings down will hear all of us
soon!"
That would be the beginning of a
brief few years of soaring American hubris and
fantasies of domination wilder than those of any
caliphate-obsessed Islamic fundamentalist
terrorist, and soon enough they would leave us
high and dry in our present world of dismal
unemployment figures, rotting infrastructure,
rising gas prices, troubled treasury, and a people
on the edge.
Unless we set aside the
special ops assaults and the drone wars and take a
chance, unless we're willing to follow the example
of all those non-violent demonstrators across the
Greater Middle East and begin a genuine and speedy
withdrawal from the Af/Pak theater of operations,
Bin Laden will never die.
On September 17,
2001, Bush was asked whether he wanted Bin Laden
dead. He replied: "There's an old poster out West,
as I recall, that said 'wanted dead or alive'."
Dead or alive. Now, it turns out that there was a
third option. Dead and alive.
The chance
exists to put a stake through the heart of Bin
Laden's American legacy. After all, the man who
officially started it all is theoretically gone.
We could declare victory, Toto, and head for home.
But why do I think that, on this score, the malign
wizard is likely to win?
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