Dead and alive
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 is a
plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and
Pakistan now in its 10th 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 revellers who appeared in front of the White House
on May 1 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 VJ day and a sailor’s kiss said it all.
Unfortunately, in every way that matters for
Americans, it is an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every
way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama
administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it is we who will
ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s
administration once so grandiosely labelled 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 neighbourhood.
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 supervillain if not a rival superpower. In actuality,
al-Qaeda, his organisation, 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 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 $4,00,000 to $5,00,000 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 Osama 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 meagre 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 Global
War on Terror. And for the last 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 organisation like his could thrive.
Don’t be surprised then that in these last 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 practising 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 Senator 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 1,00,000 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 organisation which, according to the CIA
director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that
country.
Now he is 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 will 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 that “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
theatre of operations, Osama bin Laden will never die.
On September 17, 2001 President 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
Osama 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? n
(Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire
Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture,
runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is
The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, published
by Haymarket Books. This article was posted on TomDispatch.com on May
5, 2011.)
Courtesy:
www.tomdispatch.com
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