So the Emperor announced breathlessly last night that Enemy of the State #1 has been hunted down and killed. Osama Bin Laden is no more. There was a jubilant crowd in front of the White House (I second Ilana Mercer's thoughts on how unseemly that was), and much rejoicing in the morning papers.
Whatever.
Don't get me wrong, I despise terrorists of any stripe, and oppose jihad on principle as well as in practice. But so many things about this takedown reek of stupidity, malice, or both, that I'm hard pressed to feel jubilant rather than contemptuous. First off, OBL was allegedly hiding in a compound right in the middle of a town housing the Pakistani high command and military academies - quite literally under the very nose of Empire's self-declared principal ally. Did the Pakistani military, intelligence and government know his whereabouts? If yes, that makes them liars; if not, hugely incompetent.
Then there is the whole circus of dumping his body into the sea, before any independent confirmation of his identity could be obtained. Supposedly, this was done to avoid making his grave a terrorist pilgrimage site (so why not bury him at the remote U.S. base of Diego Garcia, as Steve Sailer sensibly suggested?) and to honor Muslim religious sensibilities by giving Osama a quick burial. Except burials at sea offend those very sensibilities. Oops.
Anyway, Bin Laden is dead. That ought to mean that 9/11 is finally avenged. Outstanding news! But do you expect His Most Elevated Majesty Barack I the Blessed, Bringer of Hope and Change, to order the troops back from Afghanistan, and Iraq while at it, declare a victory and have a ticker-tape parade? Don't be silly.
Because, for all his demonstrable evil, Bin Laden was nothing more than a convenient excuse. The war was never about him, or his sad bunch of fanatical followers, or jihad, or terrorism in general. Bush the Lesser so much as admitted to it, years ago.
It has been about the Empire all along. About power. Which is why it cannot end. Not now. Not ever. Until the Empire self-destructs, anyway.
So don't you dare call this a victory. When this whole mess started, Bin Laden said exactly what he intended to do: involve America in numerous wars and make it bleed itself to death. He meant to win by losing. Well, didn't he?
I can almost hear him, cackling maniacally, all the way to Hell.
4 comments:
And now they would not release the photos because those are too "gruesome" for us too watch. So much concern for everyone's feelings! Truly touching.
The only thing noteworthy about this item of Spectacle that endures more than about five minutes is an eerie feeling of utter unreality.
"Buried at sea?"--Rodriguez lifted Guevara's wristwatch, which he still wears and cut off the hands to be sent on for verification of identity.
In this drama the archvillain is not captured and interrogated (as the supposed head of a world-wide terrorist network, after all, he might actually know something), but is executed quickly and given an Islamic burial at sea.
Were there military honors and a band to boot?
Was he buried right next to Abu Nidal, his palindromic namesake?
It would seem that the scriptwriters behind the Spectacle don't much care anymore whether their political theater is credible--they just present their extravaganzas and all loose ends are supposed to disappear.
There were actually news stories yesterday titled, "Where where you when Bin Laden was killed?".
Bin Laden, whoever he was, and whoever was recently executed in Pakistan under that rubric, is known to have been a CIA ally in Afghanistan in the Soviet Afghan War.
Moreover, not only was the US involved in that war indirectly but so was Israel, which the Americans were openly bragging about recently in the film "Charlie Wilson's War".
Then there was the first failed attempt on the World Trade Center that hardly anyone ever mentions.
Then suddenly a second successful try from the air with the ringleader, erstwhile CIA ally, in a fictional James Bond lair in Afghanistan, where he was not findable--despite really hard looking mind you--for a decade of war.
Then suddenly the dramatis persona appears in a luxurious compound in Pakistan, next to Pakistani military headquarters, and no one even mentions kidney dialysis.
If the official story of 9-11 was even close to real, one conclusion is the utter incompetence of US intelligence and the military.
If this new official story is close to true, then the incompetence of the second part is a hundred times more imbecilic than the incompetence of the first part.
Is Elvis still in the building?
In any case, two major points that may be worth pondering at length:
(1)sundry Neo-Cons in the US are now using this theater to suggest even more belligerent US action against Pakistan, which country one will recall was a major item in the Neo-Con Project For A New Israeli-American Century.
(2)Cameron just yesterday apparently could not suppress the Cheney brain transplant he had after he was elected in Britain and has now called on all to remember that even though Colonel Gaddafi and Osama Bin Elvis hated one another intensely, they both hated Britain more, apparently for its freedom. This linking is an almost exact replica of what was said about Saddam Hussein--to wit, well, of course, Elvis was persona non grata in Hussein's Iraq but still the two just had to be criminally plotting together, for which evidence was quickly manufactured.
Voila, after the US invasion of Iraq under Bush younger "Al Qaeda" suddenly materializes in Iraq.
Will they also find a Milosevic connection to Bin Elvis in all those supposed computer records, and other documents tying him to Belarus and Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua and maybe to China, Brazil, Turkey and even Putin?
Don't be too quick to laugh. As Gianfranco Sanguinetti long ago noted--the Spectacle had already become autistic in his day, by which he implied a kind of collective insulation of its players from reality. And with this sort of autism anything is possible, so just sit back and watch the show.
And oh, one never really doubted that the US landed a man on the moon, but it is getting harder and harder nowadays not to wonder.
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