How the West built Osama Bin Laden
(From the Martyn Bradbury Collection on loan from the Art Museum of Cynicism)
What a dreadful waste of a decade for the West's 'war of terrorism'. Over a Trillion dollars in direct costs and anywhere between 100 000 and a million dead civilians (we're not sure because we don't count 'them' when they die). The biggest waste has been that we don't seem to have learnt a God damned thing from Osama Bin Laden.
I love how the retrospectives of Osama all come to that point in his history where the CIA funded him, that the narrator always mumbles a bit. What have we learnt in a decade? Osama Bin Laden was created by Western foreign policy. We couldn't give him enough guns when he was killing Soviets but didn't see that we were seeding the grounds for a pathological monster.
Osama made the connection that there was no point fighting the regimes in the Middle East that the West propped up, he concluded the taxpayers of America were as legitimate a target as military ones because it was the over arching Washington concensus global economic hegemonic structure that funded the repression of Muslim countries.
You would think after such spectacular blow back that we would at least stop sowing the seeds of tomorrow's monsters with today's black ops budgets, but no, we are seeding the monsters in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and Tajikistan while continuing to prop up CIA client dictatorships.
We've learnt fuck all in a decade.
Turns out the West was the weapon of mass destruction.
posted by Bomber @ 5:43 am
6 comments
6 Comments:
I flicked over to Breakfast this morning to check in on their spin. It coincided perfectly with them reading out your comments Bomber. The cheerleader...or presenter/ game show hostess, looked genuinely confused. I gather a knowledge of History is not a prerequisite of being allowed to be a commentator on our State Broadcaster. Rather blonde hair and a broad Kiwi drawl.
It is interesting that without exception the line from the establishment has been very clear moving forward. This is not the end of anything, rather it emboldens us to push harder to pursue the extremists our policy creates.
They ignore the peaceful uprisings for Democracy in the Middle East this year and the irrelevance of al-Qaeda in achieving what their objective has been, to topple the Dictators and weaken Western influence.
Juan Cole has an interesting Historical roundup quoted and linked below, it's conclusion is optimistic, but given the narrative of Obama and Cameron, Blair and Merkel and Key, I think it may be fantasy. We don't want Democracy for these people, we want to govern the globe and to control it's resources, and we will pursue this mercilessly.
"Usama Bin Laden was a violent product of the Cold War and the Age of Dictators in the Greater Middle East. He passed from the scene at a time when the dictators are falling or trying to avoid falling in the wake of a startling set of largely peaceful mass movements demanding greater democracy and greater social equity. Bin Laden dismissed parliamentary democracy.."
"Seven major Afghan guerrilla groups were fostered and given CIA training in camps. The Soviets fought back viciously. In that decade, perhaps a million Afghans were killed, 3 million were displaced to Pakistan, 2 million were displaced to Iran, and 2 million were displaced inside Afghanistan. In a country of, at that time, perhaps 15 million persons."
"The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur"
"If Obama can get us out of Iraq, and if he can use his good offices to keep the pressure on the Egyptian military to lighten up, and if he can support the likely UN declaration of a Palestinian state in September, the US will be in the most favorable position in the Arab world it has had since 1956. And he would go down in history as one of the great presidents."
http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/obama-and-the-end-of-al-qaeda.html
And how about the burial at sea the day of the announcement, no Che Guevara posturing. Seems to be a little strange don't you think?
A little confused rufustfirefly22? He was a maniac and we are all better off without him, although having him as a prisoner would have better positioned us to take the moral high ground. I have yet to hear anyone be an apologist for his beliefs or tactics.But we would have been even better not to have created him and we should learn from the experiment and view his actions in the context of History and not create more of him.
But when the true exercise is to maintain the control of the region and it's resources and by extension maintain Empire, first established by the Brits and handed down to the US, this is unlikely. He and those like him to follow are the byproduct of those dictators and our occupations and a foreign policy which has been uniformly expressed by the establishment since his assassination.
Remember it was Ronald Regan who called them Freedom Fighters and dedicated a space shuttle flight to them and their cause. Go on, watch the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipszh14WPFY&feature=related
Nobody has compared him to Che Guevara, rather assumed they would parade his body as they did as evidence of the assassination of Che. You should read more carefully.
I will never be an apologist for mass murder or extremism or Fascism (surely Empire is a form of Fascism?), which is why I apply the same standards to the perpetrators of Imperialism, and depleted uranium and drones and torture and agent orange and Dictators in the Middle East and previously in South America as I do to the mass murderer who was killed yesterday.
.... the point is rufustfirefly22, you're right, he was working "to impose an even greater theocratic dictatorship in the caliphate", but his aim was overtaken by a population of young Muslims fighting on the streets to remove these Dictators in the pursuit of freedom and democracy. Bin Laden failed in his enterprise, he didn't have a mandate, he was an extremist not only to the West. These uprisings give lie to the narrative that you obviously uphold, that if we don't support - militarily and financially - Fascism in the Muslim world, extremism will take over. We are complicit in mass murder!
The next chapter's being written, and both you and Usama, are stuck in a Cold War narrative.
from Adam Curtis..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/03/osama-bin-laden-soviet-union-baddie
"I gather a knowledge of History is not a prerequisite of being allowed to be a commentator on our State Broadcaster."
I think that might be true.
But being able to read a tele-prompter is a key and necessary pre-requisite skill for the role.
Post a Comment
<< Home