I can’t say that I’m not happy — in fact I’d be one of the first to piss on his grave (if he hadn’t apparently been buried at sea in an attempt to deprive his acolytes of a potential ‘shrine’).
USAns are celebrating almost as frenziedly as they did at the end of WWII — one US commentator interviewed here tried to explain that as “a deserved triumphalism over a dangerous enemy who managed to bring down two symbols of American Might.” This is ridiculous. Firstly the ‘dangerous enemy’ was the ‘guru’ of a ragtag band of trainee clerics armed with box-cutters, not Admiral Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and secondly the ‘War on Terror’ was nothing like WWII — to say otherwise is to insult those who fought and died in the latter.
But the ruling class in the US did not always harbour such malice toward Osama. Back in the 1980s (waaay before ‘9/11’ and well before most had even heard his name), bin Laden was a Hero. In an article entitled “Bin Laden Comes Home to Roost,” from the MSNBC Web site in 1998, bin Laden’s unclassified CIA biography states that he ran a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar — the MAK — which funnelled money, arms and personnel to Afghanistan (These were the mujahedin ‘freedom fighters,’ the bloodthirsty throwbacks to mediaevalism who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and skinned Communist teachers alive for the ‘crime’ of teaching little girls to read and write). MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the main CIA conduit for ’Charlie Wilson’s War,’ the imperialists’ covert war against the ‘Evil Empire’ of the USSR in Afghanistan. The article quotes Republican Orrin Hatch, senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that he would make the same call today knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said. “Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.” [I shall have more to say about Afghanistan in later posts].
Ironically the same Fall From Grace overtook Saddam Hussein, the USA’s BFF in the 1980s’ proxy war against the Evil Ayatollahs of Iran. It would seem to argue that becoming a client of the Empire is not particularly a good idea — save for the fact that plenty do and manage to survive.
To see what makes a ‘survivor,’ let’s look at Chilean ‘president’ Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet accepted his US-authored brief, to get rid of the ‘evil leftist,’ Salvador Allende, round up and ‘disappear’ (rape / torture / murder) the latter’s supporters and turn Chile into an experimental laboratory for neoliberal economic theology. This he did, faithfully and joyfully — and then he stopped. For the rest of his life (well, until Chileans had finally decided they had had enough and the Empire decided he was surplus to requirements in its geopolitical games), he sat on his arse in his palace in Santiago, collecting his CIA pension, perusing the latest Gospel from the Chicago School of Economics, keeping the living standards of ordinary Chilean workers and farmers at rock-bottom while lining the pockets of the wealthy, signing the odd Death Warrant for an ‘uppity’ worker or university student, and looking forward to the annual telegram from his chum, Maggot Thatcher. He didn’t try to invade another Imperial client state like Saddam did in 1990, nor did he have intoxicating visions of recreating the religious empires of the early Middle Ages like bin Laden and his islamist mates.
One imagines that if Uncle Adolf had confined himself to ‘righting’ the German economy in the interests of capitalism and ‘disappearing’ only German ‘liberals,’ trade unionists, communists, homosexuals, Jews and Gypsies he would have been allowed to stay in place as long as his Spanish colleague, Francisco Franco — especially given the popularity of fascism among the ruling classes of the Anglosphere.
Truly, international relations is rather like that early episode of Ally McBeal where the naïve new employee Portia diRossi says to Calista Flockhart, “We hate her, right?” — we never know who we’re going to be friends with unless our ‘betters’ (politicians, military men, intelligence agents, media proprietors and even shock jocks) tell us. And we little people love whom we’re told to love and hate “the Enemies of our Country / Race / Religion / Civilization.”
Yes, I hated Osama, but not for the reasons the above-mentioned ‘betters’ give me. I hated him because he was a reactionary, god-bothering, misogynist wanker — but then, so is GW Bush, and I’ll happily piss on his grave too!
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