Remember when the Bush White House assured us that Osama bin Laden was on the run and no longer of any importance? Now, nine long years after 9/11, President Barack Obama has just told us that America is "at war" with al-Qaida.
Back in 1986, I was covering the anti-Soviet war in then almost unknown Afghanistan. I called on the grandly titled "Afghan Information Center" in Peshawar, Pakistan. Peshawar was and remains a wild, dangerous place. In my book on Afghanistan, War at the Top of the World, I called it, "Dodge City meets the Arabian Nights."
The information center turned out to be a drab little office filled with mimeographed pamphlets and piles of dusty books.
Its director was a short, thin man in a torn sweater named Abdullah Azzam. We spoke at length of the anti-Soviet jihad (struggle) in Afghanistan being waged by Afghan and Arab mujahidin with US, British, Pakistani and Saudi backing.
Then, Azzam told me with a surprisingly fierce look for so mild a man, "when we have driven the Communist imperialists from Afghanistan, we will go on and drive the American imperialists from Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world."
I was absolutely floored. Except for the usual Communist invective against our nation, I had never heard anyone call my beloved America an imperialist power. In those days, the US appeared the acme of good - in large part because its rival, the Soviet Union, looked so wicked.
But after the USSR collapsed, absolute power absolutely corrupted Washington's ruling circles and drove them to seek "full spectrum domination" of the globe and its energy resources rather than a cooperative new world order. Mikhail Gorbachev called this one of the great tragedies of modern history.
Sheik Abdullah Azzam was the teacher and spiritual mentor of a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam gave bin Laden the blueprint for his later war against the west.
Azzam was murdered in 1989, likely by a western intelligence service. His pupil, Osama, launched a seemingly quixotic mission to overthrow the western-backed dictatorships and monarchies that misruled the Muslim world, and drive US, British and French power from the region.
Bin Laden proclaimed his grand strategy in the 1990's. He vowed to oust the modern western 'Crusaders' by provoking the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America's Achilles' heel.
Bin Laden was dismissed by western intelligence as a crackpot and "enragé."
But both the dim-witted President George W. Bush and the intelligent President Barack Obama fell right into Osama's carefully-laid trap.
Today, as we witness hysteria and chaos engulf America's air travel system, and the war party in Washington demands the US invade Yemen and attack Iran, we should recall Osama's ominous warning, "there will be no peace in America until there is peace in Palestine."
US airport security officials will be even more panicked when they learn a jihadist recently tried to assassinate Saudi Arabia's interior minister, Prince Nayef, by detonating a bomb secreted in his rectum.
The American colossus continues to stumble ever deeper into the Muslim world's violent, tangled affairs at a time when Washington is bankrupt and only runs on Chinese loans. In 2009, the US deficit was US $1.4 trillion. But Washington managed to spend $200 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by loading the costs onto the national credit card.
American soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. US Special Forces, air units and CIA mercenaries are involved in combat operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa, North Africa and the Philippines. A new US base at Djibouti is launching raids into Yemen, Somalia and northern Kenya. US forces aided the failed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006. New US bases are planned in oil-producing West Africa and Colombia. The US now has as many mercenaries in the field as soldiers.
The Red Sea littoral is America's next major headache. Somalia's anti-western Shebab movement controls much of that nation's south and center. Yemen is a hotbed of jihadist activity that increasingly threatens neighboring Saudi Arabia, a vital American ally. Somali pirates could turn from plunder to striking at other western interests.
As soon as the US or its satraps crush one anti-western jihadist group, another springs up somewhere else.
Washington is quietly engineering the breakup of troubled Sudan, Africa's largest nation, in order to dominate South Sudan's important oil resources and undermine the regime in Khartoum which Washington has marked for termination.
Even Egypt is growing shaky. The US-backed Mubarak military dictatorship that has ruled the Arab world's most populous nation with an iron hand since 1981 faces a succession struggle once the 82-year-old pharaoh is gone.
Al-Qaida is no longer the tiny organization founded by Osama bin Laden that never numbered more than 300 hard core members. It has morphed into a worldwide movement of like-minded but independent, revolutionary, anti-American groups that share Osama's militant philosophy. This is precisely the kind of 'asymmetrical warfare' the Pentagon has so long feared.
Ominously, a 2006 World Public Opinion poll showed large majorities in four leading Muslim nations that are key US allies, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Indonesia (a third of the Muslim world's population), believe the US is determined to destroy or undermine Islam. The people of those nations support attacks on American targets. This was an ominous warning for the United States.
But America still refuses to face the hard reality that what drives anti-western violence is not Islam, as neocons claim, but Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Margolis' post is right on target. OBL suckered Cheney and Bush into Afghanistan and Iraq, getting us just where he wanted us. Their total investment was, what, $400,000 maximum in box cutters, rudimentary flight and martial arts training for the hijackers and first-class tickets for practice runs as well as for the actual event. The strategy was to bang the stupid giant so hard with a hammer on his big toe that he would overreact and begin flailing about, so as to create even more enemies and to drain his strength. Midnight Cowboy George served perfectly as bait; how fortunate Gore wasn't in power, which would have made things much more difficult..... GWB's invasion of Iraq to show up his daddy was predictable and served to eliminate one of OBL's main mortal enemies (Saddam). Chess game indeed....
Obama was left by Bush with an enormous mess which has sadly proved even beyond his own much greater intellectual abilities....as the viscosity due to reactive support for the rightmost Israeli positions, the manipulative and deceptive media and the seemingly infinite
momentum of the military machine sucks him (and us) ever downwards into the maelstrom....
OBL sits in his cave and laughs out loud; all is much more than going to plan, as the next step- surrogates actually taking power in Saudi or Pak???... will fall into place...
The media titans make certain that the American public gets the neocon message. Contrary to common sense in the midst of employment, housing & healthcare crises, the American public is fed a daily diet of justification for warmongering, profiteering & occupation by the journalistic establishment.
OBL has exposed our corruption and moral bankruptcy exquisitely ....will we go all the way down.....can this prophet really defeat the tiger issuing fatwa's from a cave???
Yes, thank you for repeating the liberal talking points.
Now Inconvenient truth 1
According to series of World Gallup polls the supports for Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden has plummeted since Afghanistan invasion and the victory in Iraq.
One of the reasons it plummeted is the defeat suffered by Al Qaeda throughout the world.
it is an unspoken, but well accepted truth that losers are not respected in Muslims culture.2.
Inconvenient truth 2:
Recent Poll of Afghan. BBC, ABC and German TV:
.61% of Afghans favor the military buildup of 37,000 U.S. and NATO reinforcements
61 % of the Afghans surveyed said they expect the next generation will have a better life.
42 % of Afghans blame the Taliban for the violence — up 27 percent from a year ago.
17% blame the U.S. and NATO, or the Afghan government or Afghan security forces — down 36% percent from a year ago.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100111/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_poll
Questions, anyone?
I have to remember to tell all of our "satrapies" what to do next month, they need instructions, right? Ok, let me think.....Pakistani's: kill your homegrown Talibs. Egyptians, keep the tourists safe. Saudis, keep oil pumping to Europe.
And I love how the writer pins Azzam's killing on a "western agency". We should have been so lucky that our spy services were that forward thinking. It is as much, or more likely, that Azzam was killed by one of his own in an internal struggle for the shrinking pool of foreign donations.
Break their confidence. If al-Qaida is measuring their success by our collapse, we need to light the fires of economic growth. Don't wait for a politician to do it, the economy doesn't revolve around them, it revolves around us.
How far does your dollar go? All the way to China? That doesn't stimulate our economy, it diminishes it. Buy American, because our trade deficit is crushing us, and if we don't fix that, we never recover and al-Qaida wins. Think currency value. Our OPEC prop was kicked out from under our supply and demand fix, by the "Axis of Evil" that Bush willed into being. Now our trade deficit really does matter.
Consumer confidence would be a better tool if it was explained. Confidence would be a given if spending was sure to fuel the economy.
No confidence yet? Not surprising, you and I are not going to fix the problem alone, and nobody else is listening. Wait for a politician to stand up and tell it to us like it is? Or can we somehow create a movement of our own?
You want lower tax rates? Single Payer Health Care?... We need a better economy. More jobs? ...
Now. Let's talk to our terrorist hating brothers in the GOP about this, and see if we can't make this economy boom like we were all on the same side for once.
This movie was not released on DVD and has not been repeated on HBO (it was an HBO movie) since 9/11 but yet it almost prophetically spoke of what these "terrorists" would accomplish or certainly look to accomplish "next time".
But yet we hear that "No one could have predicted", yes? Except maybe Tom Clancy when he wrote the novel "The Sum of all fears" (1991) in which "terrorists" crashed a jet airliner into a football game to kill the President of the US and the Prime Minister of England. Or the guys who wrote the movie "Executive Decision" (1996) in which "terrorists" used a commercial jet loaded with "nerve gas" in an attempt to detonate it over the eastern seaboard of the US.
Food for thought, yes?
Do people really think Bin Laden failed because we didn't wind up speaking Arabic on 9/12/01or anytime since?
"Tribal" chess players playing "Super-power" checker players...
Although I do understand that opposition to militant Jihadism is contrary to liberal dogma, which automatically adopts any enemy of the West as a sympathetic ally.
So who is right?
With respect, I think both of you are wrong as both take their own "dogma" to such an extreme that no other thought is allowed lest one be called "traitor".
Most intelligence says that Al Qaida is more powerful and capable now than ever before and that includes prior to 9/11.
I know many *hyper* bleeding heart liberals and not one of them is *actually* sympathetic to true militant jihadism. And certainly none of them hate America nor offer true succor to "enemies of the west". I know Fox, et al, insists all people not on the hard-right hate American and anything America does, etc, etc...but alas, that actual narrative in the *real* world is a bit more subtle.
I also know true conservatives who do not think the only answer is full scale invasion of any country that birthed a terrorist.
People on the left of liberalism accept the possibility of a struggle against religious oppression and fundamentalism.
We, the socialist and communists, in the West have defeated the religious oppression and intolerance ( no thanks to bourgeois liberals who just stay at home or worse ) in fierce struggle.
And we wedded to the erroneous and arrogant concept that all Third World militant movements are benevolent by the virtue of their opposition to the West.
"a jihadist recently tried to assassinate Saudi Arabia's interior minister, Prince Nayef, by detonating a bomb secreted in his rectum."