Socialist Worker (US)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nTHE ASSASSINATION of Osama bin Laden is being celebrated as rough justice by U.S. politicians across the spectrum and a mainstream media that is glorying in every grisly detail.<\/p>\n
It is nothing of the sort. Bin Laden\u2019s death did not make the world \u201csafer\u201d and \u201ca better place,\u201d as Barack Obama claimed in his televised speech Sunday night. On the contrary, this political killing will be used to make the world less safe\u2013by building support for more violence committed by the U.S. government in the name of the \u201cwar on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hunt for bin Laden while he was alive was never about justice, but justification. Revenge for al-Qaeda\u2019s September 11 attacks was the most effective selling point for U.S. wars and occupations that weren\u2019t designed to make the world safe from terrorism, but to safeguard the flow of Middle East oil and ensure the continued domination of the U.S. empire.<\/p>\n
Now that bin Laden is dead, this former U.S. ally-turned-public enemy number one will be exploited again\u2013his killing proclaimed as a vindication of 10 years of bloodshed on a scale far more horrible than anything al-Qaeda was ever capable of.<\/p>\n
News of bin Laden\u2019s death produced an outburst of jingoism and anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S. The New York Daily News printed \u201cRot in hell!\u201d across its front cover. In Portland, Maine, the words \u201cOsama Today Islam tomorow (sic)\u201d were found spray-painted on a mosque. As Obama was announcing the killing on television, crowds of people gathered outside the White House to chant \u201cUSA, USA, USA\u201d\u2013the very image of callous arrogance that stokes bitter anger toward the U.S. around the world.<\/p>\n
Anyone who cares about peace and justice needs to raise their voice against these celebrations, because they only pave the way for more war. \u201cWhenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed,\u201d wrote Salon.com\u2019s Glenn Greenwald.<\/p>\n
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THE OPERATION to kill bin Laden\u2013carried out by Navy SEAL commandos inside Pakistan with no notification to a supposed ally, apparently ending with bin Laden being summarily put to death\u2013was typical of the \u201cwar on terror.\u201d The U.S. government claimed the right to be judge, jury and executioner far beyond its borders\u2013a calculated message to the world that the U.S. recognizes no limits on its actions, either from international law or the norms of civilized behavior.<\/p>\n
But this is nothing new. For 10 years, America\u2019s military machine has been judge, jury and executioner for tens of thousands of Afghans who did nothing more than go to a wedding or travel in the wrong area\u2013and that\u2019s not to mention the victims of the U.S. who are labeled \u201crebel fighters,\u201d and whose only crime was to resist an occupation of their country.<\/p>\n
The toll of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d has been compounded many times over with invasions and assaults carried out or backed by the U.S. in Iraq\u2013the greatest killing field for the American empire in recent years\u2013in Palestine, in Pakistan and Yemen and Sudan, and now in Libya.<\/p>\n
No reader of SocialistWorker.org will mourn bin Laden\u2019s death in and of itself. He was a political reactionary whose ideology and actions set back the cause of democracy and freedom.<\/p>\n
The victims of al-Qaeda\u2019s attacks against U.S. targets have almost always been ordinary people who bore no responsibility for the crimes of imperialism. In the Middle East and elsewhere, bin Laden and his followers have been equally vicious, if not more so, toward fellow Arabs and Muslims who oppose their hard-line version of Islam. The U.S. and its allies around the world have not been weakened by September 11 and other such attacks\u2013on the contrary, al-Qaeda\u2019s violence has been used as a pretext to advance the imperial project.<\/p>\n
But bin Laden\u2019s assassination is already being used to renovate the \u201cwar on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the Bush administration\u2019s plan following September 11, the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq would be the springboard for a transformation of the Arab and Muslim world\u2013at the point of U.S. guns. But the resistance in Iraq made a mockery of Bush\u2019s claim of \u201cMission Accomplished\u201d\u2013just as the continuing opposition to the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan has frustrated Obama\u2019s troop \u201csurge\u201d there.<\/p>\n
For the last five years, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown steadily more unpopular. But now, at last, the U.S. war machine and its cheerleaders have a \u201csuccess\u201d to celebrate. That is the importance of bin Laden\u2019s killing to the U.S. political establishment\u2013and the reason the fawning media relishes the grotesque stories of his corpse being dragged away from the murder scene and dumped in the sea.<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s speech announcing the killing included not a single word about the lies used to justify invading and occupying countries halfway around the world\u2013nor the least recognition of the terrible toll on the region. On the contrary, as antiwar activist Phyllis Bennis pointed out, Obama equated the operation to kill bin Laden and the ongoing \u201cwar on terror\u201d with, among other things, the \u201cstruggle for equality for all our citizens.\u201d As Bennis wrote, \u201cIn President Obama\u2019s iteration, the global war on terror apparently equals the anti-slavery and civil rights movements.\u201d<\/p>\n
This twisted hypocrisy must be exposed and opposed\u2013along with future operations of the U.S. military machine undertaken in the name of stopping terrorism.<\/p>\n
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ONE INCONVENIENT truth you won\u2019t hear much about in the media\u2019s celebration of bin Laden\u2019s death is the fact that the U.S. government helped him form al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n
When the former USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. saw an opportunity to turn the country into a battlefield in the Cold War. The Democratic Carter administration and then the Republican Reagan administration supported fundamentalist rebel groups, known as the mujahideen, against the USSR\u2019s occupation. According to James Ingalls and Sonali Kolhatkar\u2019s book Bleeding Afghanistan, \u201cThe amount of U.S. and Saudi assistance to these groups started at around $30 million in 1980, and increased to over $1 billion per year in 1986\u201389.\u201d<\/p>\n
The U.S. ignored progressive and secular forces in Afghanistan, instead funneling support to fundamentalist groups that were not only anticommunist, but notorious for their brutality\u2013warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, for example, was known for throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women. These were the rebels who Ronald Reagan praised as \u201cfreedom fighters.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Taliban emerged in 1994 and took power in the war-ravaged country a few years later. Its members were trained in religious schools set up by the Pakistani government\u2013with U.S. support\u2013along the border. The Taliban\u2019s ultra-fundamentalist view of Islam\u2013including denying women the right to work or even show their faces in public\u2013wasn\u2019t condemned by the U.S. government at the time.<\/p>\n
As for Bin Laden, he was a businessman from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia and one of the first non-Afghan volunteers to join the mujahideen. He recruited some 4,000 of the 35,000 non-Afghan Muslims who fought in Afghanistan, and developed close relations with the most radical rebel leaders. He also worked closely with the CIA, raising money from private Saudi citizens.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 1988, with U.S. knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at least 26 countries,\u201d wrote Indian journalist Rahul Bhedi. \u201cWashington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda, confident that it would not directly impinge on the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now that bin Laden has been executed, there will be no trial to examine the U.S. government\u2019s connections to the man whose murder allegedly makes the world \u201csafer.\u201d Nor will there be any difficult questions about the Taliban\u2019s offers in 2001 to turn over bin Laden to the U.S. for trial if Washington provided evidence of his crimes.<\/p>\n
The Bush administration wasn\u2019t interested in a peaceful solution. It wanted the \u201cwar on terror\u201d to project U.S. power around the globe. September 11 wasn\u2019t a tragedy to the leaders of the U.S. government, but an opening. Thus, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice urged aides to speculate about \u201chow you capitalize on these opportunities\u201d from September 11, as she told New Yorker magazine writer Nicholas Lehmann.<\/p>\n
During the Cold War era, the U.S. had justified its stockpile of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet, its war on national liberation movements, and its support for repressive regimes as a means of combating \u201ccommunism.\u201d But after the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. struggled to find an enemy that could justify its efforts to expand its empire.<\/p>\n
September 11 was the \u201ccatastrophic and catalyzing event\u2013like a new Pearl Harbor\u201d\u2013that neoconservative supporters of the Bush administration had openly longed for one year previously to make Islam the new enemy, with their old ally Osama bin Laden front and center.<\/p>\n
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THUS, WHILE most people were still dealing with the enormity of what happened on September 11, the U.S. political and military establishment was demanding blood. But as Socialist Worker wrote in an editorial that night:<\/p>\n
In their rush to assign blame and demand revenge, no politicians or journalists bothered to ask a simple question: Why would someone target the U.S.?<\/p>\n
The answer is the devastation and misery wreaked around the world by the U.S. in its role as the world\u2019s biggest superpower. In the last two decades alone, the U.S. has launched military attacks on Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia\u2013and this is not even to count wars where the U.S. backed a proxy force.<\/p>\n
In the Middle East, U.S. policy has left millions embittered and angry. America\u2019s support for Israeli repression of Palestinians is one part of the picture. So is the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. The war killed as many as 200,000 Iraqis\u2013most of them civilians\u2013and left the country in a \u201cpre-industrial state,\u201d according to the United Nation. Since then, UN sanctions against Iraq\u2013backed most strongly by the U.S.\u2013have killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children.<\/p>\n
In a chilling 1995 interview, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright justified these deaths, saying, \u201cWe think the price is worth it.\u201d We should remember Albright\u2019s words when we hear the drumbeat about \u201cterrorists\u201d who \u201chave no regard for human life.\u201d To the Bushes and Albrights of this world, such rhetoric is only an excuse to justify atrocities far worse than the ones committed in New York and Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
The nearly 10 years of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d have taken an even greater toll\u2013at least 1 million people are dead as a result of the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq alone. U.S. military action has spread from Afghanistan to Iraq, and now to Pakistan, Libya and many more countries. The \u201cdevastation and misery wreaked around the world\u201d by the American empire is greater today than 2001.<\/p>\n
The \u201cwar on terror,\u201d justified as the only way to stamp out bin Laden and al-Qaeda, has made the world a more violent and dangerous place. With every bomb that falls on an Afghan wedding party or every carload of Iraqis slaughtered at a checkpoint, the world\u2019s only superpower created more despair and bitterness toward the U.S. and its allies\u2013creating the circumstances in which terrorism can thrive.<\/p>\n
Since the beginning of this year, the Middle East has become a focal point for the world for very different reasons. From Tunisia and Egypt in northern Africa to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf and many countries in between, masses of people have risen up against dictators and regimes that uphold the imperialist order\u2013some of them backed wholeheartedly by the U.S. and others more tentatively.<\/p>\n
Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were made irrelevant by the actions of millions of people who rebelled on the basis of mass action and solidarity, not the violence of a small minority seeking to impose its religious views.<\/p>\n
The assassination of bin Laden will help Washington in its attempts to retake the initiative with a revitalized \u201cwar on terror.\u201d We need to stand up against the grisly celebrations of bin Laden\u2019s killing\u2013and insist, as Martin Luther King did more than 40 years ago, that the \u201cgreatest purveyor of violence in the world\u201d is the U.S. government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After years in which its wars have become more and more unpopular, the U.S. political and military establishment finally has a \u201csuccess\u201d to celebrate. 3 May 2011 The following article first appeared in Socialist Worker (US) THE ASSASSINATION of Osama bin Laden is being celebrated as rough justice by U.S. politicians across the spectrum and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1843,1867,1845,1868,1870],"tags":[1019],"class_list":["post-2015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-capitalists-organise","category-emancipation-liberation-and-self-determination","category-us-imperialism","category-against-imperialism","category-middle-east-and-north-africa","tag-author-socialist-worker-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"views":49924,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2015"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5373,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015\/revisions\/5373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}