Osama bin Laden - Dead And Alive

I realize this is not a political blog, but as there is practically a mention of OBL in every conceivable place, with opinions as varied as... well, opinions, then I figured I at least contribute some reflections of the bigger picture surrounding bin Laden, or maybe not so much him, but what he as a symbol has come to represent.

As everybody not blind, deaf, and dumb knows by now, Osama bin Laden has supposedly been eliminated.  Literally. By Navy Seals.  Or as one of a crowd of revelers who appeared in front of the White House recently 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 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’s the general Americans who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labeled the Global War on Terror.  (One may note the difference between Obama and Osama is "bs".)

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 nonviolent 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 in the west.  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 U.S., 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 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 - $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 U.S.  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 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 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 organization 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 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.”

The Arab Spring

Indeed, from the point of view of America and many of its allies, the most menacing symbol in the Arab World today is not Osama bin Laden but another Arab who recently met a violent death -- Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor who chose to set himself on fire after being harassed by corrupt local police.

His act, of course, ignited the storm that has spread across the Arab World and proven a much more serious threat to America's allies in the region than al-Qaeda ever was. Ironically, his sacrifice probably also dealt a far more devastating blow to al-Qaeda's fortunes than the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

The Arab world today bears no relationship to the situation a decade ago after 9/11. Obsessed with bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the U.S. has been sucked into a vast quagmire -- a disaster for the Americans, their economy, and their standing in the Arab World.

What particularly provoked Osama bin Laden -- a Saudi -- was the decision of Saudi rulers to accept the presence of more than a hundred thousand "infidel" U.S. troops and their allies in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. In general, he and his followers were outraged by U.S. support for corrupt, repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Yemen, as well, of course, for America's backing of Israel.

As Osama himself told CNN in 1997, "the U.S. wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this. If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists... Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world."

Bin Laden's message resonated throughout the Muslim world. But U.S. officials remained deaf to its meaning, and continued obsessed with al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. The upshot -- U.S. policy was the best recruiter Osama could have asked for. Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, CIA killer teams, mercenaries, predators, and "diplomats" swarmed across the region from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia, supported by sprawling new bases and pharaonic embassies.

The bill for all this -- for an America crippled by cutbacks in health, infrastructure. and education -- will be in the trillions of dollars. But despite this massive effort, none of those targeted Arab countries could by any stretch of the imagination be considered a success story. Hostility to the U.S. is high throughout the region. In polls, the majority of those Arabs queried consider the United States a greater threat than al-Qaeda.

Dead and Alive

As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on the 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 up the US and the west 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 the American world, where they are to cower in terror; with constitutional rights slowly diminishing under the guise of fighting terror,  while lashing out militarily.

In many ways, he broke the US, not on 9/11 but in the months and years after.  As a result, if the US doesn't have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars it continues to fight with disastrous results will prove to be his monument, and America's 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 U.S. 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 CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 - 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 America's excuse and our demon.  He possessed the 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, the US should probably be in mourning for what it buried long before they had bin Laden’s body, for what America allowed him (and their own imperial greed) to goad them into doing to themselves, and what, in the course of that, they 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 their country 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 the US set aside the special ops assaults and the drone wars and take a chance, unless they're willing to follow the example of all those nonviolent demonstrators across the Greater Middle East and begin a genuine and speedy withdrawal from the Af/Pak theater 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?