DEATH OF OSAMA

When I first heard that Navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden, I thought, big deal. So we broke into an old man's house and killed him. Who cares?

But after reading Nicholas Schmidle's story in the Aug. 8 New Yorker magazine, I changed my mind. Here is a link:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle

I don't believe many Americans have bothered to read Osama's own writing. He sent a long letter to then-President George W. Bush that I doubt if Bush even read. As I recall, Bush never answered Bin Laden, which I found strange.

The main thing Osama wanted was to get foreign troops out of the Arabian Peninsula, as I remember it. Does that seem so bad? If Arab troops were occupying Long Island, New York, or Florida, say, how would we feel about it? We'd want to kick their butts to kingdom-come, wouldn't we?

OK, so that seems understandable enough. But there was another side to Osama.

After the horrific attacks of 9/11, Osama talked about how "glorious" it was to see all those people die. To see the planes crash into the World Trade Center twin towers, instantly killing hundreds of people. To see people leaping to their deaths. To see body parts on the ground.  To see thousands die as the towers collapsed.

That's pretty sick. If Osama wanted to convince people that he was brutal, bloodthirsty, and unfeeling, he did a pretty good job.

I think Osama got what was coming to him.  

Yes, I think we in the good old USA have done things we shouldn't have. The invasion of Iraq, for one thing. Talk about sick. Estimates of the dead run higher than 100,000. Bush himself said some 30,000 people had died there.

But there has to be another way.

The noted Liberal activist Michael Moore has said, “Terrorists aren't trying to kill us because they hate our freedom. They're killing us because we're in their countries killing them.”

There is a lot of truth to that. Still and all, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, to paraphrase Jesus.

Osama got what was coming to him. You shouldn't be able to get away with such brutal mass murder like that and live to tell the tale, live to brag about it, live to talk about how glorious it was. Live to plan more attacks, more killing. That's what he was doing.

All that killing on 9/11 wasn't glorious at all. Neither was Osama's death. But it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

My hat is off to President Obama and to the Navy SEALs. I never thought I'd say that, but there it is.

-- Roger

IS OSAMA WINNING?

I would not say that dead Osama bin Laden is winning, but his strategy is having a huge impact on the good old USA. Osama, you remember, set out to bring down America, like he thought he had the Soviet Union.

Now we have the fallout from our own greedy financiers in the banks and on Wall Street, who knowingly sold millions of high-risk mortgage loans to people who couldn't pay them back, and then bundled those lousy mortgages into securities and sold them to suckers around the world. Then they sat back and laughed as they got rich and the world's financial systems crumbled.

We, the good old USA, bailed out Wall Street and the banks, so our financial system wouldn't collapse. And at the same time, we created a huge infrastructure in which thousands of people have security clearances and we are spending billions of dollars we don't have on "defense" we don't need.

This is from AlterNet:

"...We have spent $7.6 trillion on the military and homeland security since 9/11. The Pentagon's base budget – which doesn't include the costs of fighting our wars – has increased by 81 percent during that time (43 percent when adjusted for inflation). The costs of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have now reached $1.26 trillion. But that only scratches the surface; it doesn't include the long-term costs of caring for badly wounded soldiers, for example."

These are mind-boggling amounts of money. We are "defending" ourselves to death, from an enemy that uses box cutters and packs explosives into computer printers and people's underwear. They spend dimes while we spend millions.

We are Goliath and our enemy is David. Do you remember who won that fight? Who do you think will win this time, if we don't wise up?

How stupid can we get? We are lumbering around like a massive idiot, bankrupting ourselves out of fear.

I wouldn't say Osama is winning, but his strategy is sure getting ahead. We seem to be helping him, inadvertently, but helping him nonetheless.

Even in death, he is smarter than we are.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

OSAMA: IRRELEVANT

As The New Yorker magazine pointed out in its May 16 issue (Page 89), Osama bin Laden was increasingly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

He was cut off from the "Arab Spring" and most of the Muslim world. He had established no permanent power base, and had done little to change politics or anything else.

As Steve Coll says in his article "The Outlaw," Bin Laden didn't leave much behind. "Other leaders claiming to be vanguards of revolution, such as Lenin and Castro, remade their homelands and altered global affairs."

Bin Laden did not. He "didn't leave behind ideas, either."

All he left behind was a hatred of the West, especially the USA, and one spectacular terrorist attack, on 9/11.

If we do little to fan those flames of hatred, I believe they will die out.

I don't think we should be very proud of killing Bin Laden, after all these years. There wasn't much left to kill.

What we need is a new foreign policy that will promote peace, prosperity, and democracy in the Middle East, at home, and around the world.

Here's hoping Obama can do that. The Republicans don't have a clue. I wish they did.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

OUR IDEA OF EVIL

I don't understand my fellow Americans' concept of evil.

Why is it supremely evil for Osama bin Laden to defend his homeland with terrorist tactics and kill 3,000 innocent people on 9-11-2001, while it is good or OK for George W. Bush to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, and kill 200,000 innocent people?

Can someone explain that to me? I don't get it. Who is more evil?

Osama's main goal was to get foreign military troops out of the Arabian peninsula. With no army, terrorism is a highly effective way to leverage small resources for big results.

Bush admitted killing 30,000 people in Iraq, and estimates have run as high as 500,000. Yet I didn't hear any Americans complaining, and then people gathered around and cheered when we killed Osama.

We sent a hit-squad into his house and shot him to death. I don't see how that is heroic. Let me get this straight. When we kill people, that's justice, right? And when they kill people, that's evil, right?

I still don't get it.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

OUR OSAMA?

You may wonder, these days, just who was Osama bin Laden and how did he get to be such a big deal?

Remember this: We, the good old USA, armed and trained and exalted Osama bin Laden, back when he was part of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Remember that our widely admired Republican President Ronald Reagan said these guys, including Osama, were heroes.

The best article I've seen on this is by Robert Scheer in TruthDig:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_monster_of_our_own_creation_20110504/

So now, when you hear people chant "USA, USA," like a bunch of mindless morons, and when you hear people cheering the death of Osama, remember this:

The USA giveth, and the USA taketh away.
Blessed be the name of the USA.

In other words, like Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak, and Anastasio Samoza, and Moammar Qaddafi, we love you when we need you, for our own political purposes, but when the tide of history turns against you, so do we.

When someone criticized Samoza's use of torture in Nicaragua, one of our CIA men there, I think it was, said, "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

The same thing could be said of Osama: He was a son of a bitch, but at one time he was our son of a bitch.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

OSAMA & CHE: TWO OF A KIND?

Two famous men, Osama bin Laden and Ernesto "Che" Guevara, had several things in common, it seems to me:

1. They were both extreme idealists, focused more on the way the world should be rather than the way it is.
2. They believed they had the answers to the world's most pressing problems, more so than other people.
3. They believed in violence, often extreme violence, as the best way or only way to create political change. Elections were not good enough.
4. They both thought they were special people in the world. Perhaps they were narcissists. I'm not a shrink, so I don't know.
5. Both men, although violent, were known as polite and sometimes even deferential in person. Che was extremely attractive to women, and admirable to many men personally. He was hard to resist in person. Very charismatic. I don't know about OBL.

Che killed or participated in the killing of several hundred people in Latin America. Osama, of course, planned and took credit for the killing of about 3,000 people in the USA on 9-11-2001.

In case you don't know, Osama Bin Laden was the "head" of Al Qaeda who was killed last Sunday night (1 May 2011) by U.S. special forces in in his walled compound in Pakistan. I say "head" because apparently Al Qaeda is extremely decentralized.

Here is a photo of Osama:

Che Guevara was an Argentine adventurer who helped Fidel Castro overthrow Batista in Cuba in 1959 and establish a Communist state there. His is the revolutionary image you see everywhere in the world: 

The second photo is Che fishing on May 15, 1960 off the coast of Cuba in the "Ernest Hemingway Fishing Contest," a photo that is not so famous.

Guevara was killed in Bolivia in 1967 while trying to "export" the Cuban Communist revolution to other Latin American countries, a long-term project that Che believed in and which led to his death.

To me, the most interesting things are two: their belief in violence and their extreme self-confidence that their way was the right way.

They seemed to admit no higher authority than themselves. Even though Che was against "imperialism," it seems to me he was extremely imperialistic himself. He was a follower of Fidel and always deferred to Fidel's leadership, but he always thought his ideas and his ideals were correct.

Both men, it seems to me, were unwilling to accept the flaws and the foibles of human nature, and of human society, the way that it is and probably always will be. They clung to their ideals, in spite of everything. And tried to force their ideals on others.

They were both arrogant and violent, a bad combination. A fatal flaw.

-- Roger


(Links:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

OSAMA'S DEATH: HURRAY?

Last night, I heard the news that U.S. Navy Seals had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

The first thing I thought was, how sad. Now the morons will gather together and chant "USA, USA," as if this whole thing was a stupid football game.

Sure enough, I turned on the TV and there were crowds in front of the White House and in NYC chanting, "USA, USA..."

But how many people in the USA know why Bin Laden waged this long war against us?

I actually have read two or three statements from him, published online.

Here was a man who inherited $300-million and could have done anything with his life that he wanted. He had reasons for waging war against the USA. Mostly, he wanted American troops out of the Arab peninsula.

Does that seem so horrible? Would you want your ancestral homeland occupied by foreign troops?

I agree with this quote from Michael Sheuer, former CIA analyst and the man in charge of tracking Bin Laden before 9/11:

"Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world."

I also agree with this quote from Michael Moore:

“Terrorists aren't trying to kill us because they hate our freedom. They're killing us because we're in their countries killing them.”

So why are we cheering?

Chances are, his death will have little impact on the so-called War on Terror or on anti-American feelings around the world.

So, we killed him. Now we can beat our chests and give our Tarzan yell. Hurray for us.

But we haven't changed anything. We are still killing innocent people in the Middle East, and until we stop that, we are still making enemies.

We have bungled almost everything we have done in response to the attacks of 9/11. We invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and killed thousands of innocent people, as if their blood would somehow atone for those attacks.

Most of the people we killed had little or nothing in common with those who planned and carried out those attacks. They were, metaphorically, distant relatives.

We have alienated thousands of people the world over, and now we have killed the figure-head of Al Qaeda, which is less of an organization and more of a belief system among those who see the USA as an imperialist monster.

Now more people who hate the USA will have more of a reason to attack Americans around the world.

Whoop-dee-do. Hurray for us.

But Americans should stop chanting and start reading. Maybe if we understood why Bin Laden and his followers hate us, we could make rational decisions about those policies.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

(Link to Islamist reaction:)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/02/us-binladen-militants-idUSTRE74147320110502