Bin Laden Won
He won and the US warmasters are celebrating. Imagine rejoicing after a government falls to the descendants of Al-Qaeda. We don’t have to because the Washington gang are doing just that. The Islamo-Fascist Jihadis who terrorised the minds of the West for decades are again ‘moderate rebels’.
In the twenty-odd years since the 2001 attacks, the US has found and re-discovered other enemies. North Korea has always been there to hate and fear. After the attacks, it was Russia who offered bases and support. But they are the (Soviet) Bear again. The invasion of Afghanistan would not have been possible without the assistance of Iran and their Northern Alliance allies. It may as well be the 1980s again with the hate for Tehran. China has been a constant buyer of US debt and trading partner, but not even the genocidal Mao Te-Tsung was viewed as poorly as the current mob in power. Syria had joined in on the first invasion of Iraq and Libya was desperately trying to come in from the cold. Now both of those regimes are gone, replaced by terror gangs.
In fact in 2001, I worked with a delegation of Libyans who wanted to buy Australian meat. The deal collapsed due to US government preferences (rules of sanctions and all that) but the delegates spoke of free markets and Western values. I spent a week with them, driving them around Adelaide. They even had a ‘political officer’ who barely spoke but had a photo of Qaddafi on his watch face. They were human beings, perhaps more human than any Australian government officials I had the displeasure of working with while in the meat industry. There was optimism among the younger members that Libya may be a ‘friend’.
Then Al Qaeda attacked the US. Revenge, murder, ‘Oh My God’ repeated from witnesses on the ground as buildings fell into dust. Nothing short of war was expected. The Taliban in Afghanistan did everything to co-operate with the US. The US and it’s allies invaded regardless. Bin Laden was found years later in allied Pakistan. After hundreds of thousands dead, the further ruination of the region. Twenty years later, the Taliban won. They had returned to power.
The US has been bombing Iraq since 1991, the dictator Saddam Hussein was the ‘next Hitler’ of Next Hitlers, even worse that Milosevic and Ho Chi Minh . His regime was despised. With no links to Al Qaeda. A Weapons of Mass Destruction angle was used, though if Iraq had such weapons then Hussein would still be in power, perhaps replaced by one of his loony sons. Instead, the Coalition of the Willing invaded and carnage and mass death befell the region. The belief that Iraqi oil would pay for the war was a delusion, besides can oil money bring back hundreds of thousands of lives?
Then in 2011 the Arab Spring occurred which led to the toppling of dictators and juntas through the region, some of the uprisings were supported by the West. Libya for example. Which led to a civil war and destruction that lingers on. The Syrian civil war also erupted, the violence crossing into Iraq. The US supporting former enemies, as it tends to do, in order to upset the balance of power. The Syrian government headed by Assad was pariah, so terror factions were ‘good’. Then came ISIS, the worse of the worse of all evil Islamic terror groups. There existence justified more war and interventions. Then they blended away for a time. The West fought ISIS, sort of and Assad’s regimes. Other factions fought too. It was a real mess.
Yemen suffered a genocide, a starvation war waged by the wealthy Gulf states against the poorest nation in the region. Enabled and supported by the Western nations, thousands died. The Chinese brokered a deal once it turned out that the Yemeni resistance were capable of fighting their own ‘war of the flea’ against the mighty Saudi led coalition. A coalition that had blown up school buses and had roaming ‘butcher trucks’ where men were abducted and hacked to pieces by the special forces of the allied governments. The terrorists are always on the other side, you see. Yemen still fights on, even recently taking on Israel and the US.
Russia invades Ukraine, China and Taiwan squabble, North Korea exists and Israel expands it’s territories further into Palestine and Lebanon. The US and it’s allies have it’s share of enemies. It hasn’t really won a war in a very long time. The national debt is frightening in all of the allied nations, the populations meander between addiction to ‘legal’ and illegal drugs while mental health has become both the grift that keeps on giving and a very real crisis for those who suffer. And it now seems that those burn after 2000 are less healthy than previous generations. The outsiders often claimed the West to be ‘sick’, it seems to be now in more ways than one.
The imperial amnesia is something only experienced by those nations constantly waging war, with the inability to recall history, some in the populace and the rulers with a straight face spread lies and myths without any shame or self-awareness. History is dear to many of those outside the West, it’s known and understood because it is felt. That is why even extremists are adored and followed, they are reactions to the entitled actions of Western nations and their proxies. The CIA calls it Blowback. Osama Bin Laden and men like him are blowback to foreign policies going back into the 1980s and beyond.
ISIS spoke about Sykes-Picot, to their enemies in the West those two names are forgotten. When Zionists and Arab leaders mention Balfour, the benefactors of such imperialism shrug with blank minds. History for those in the West only started in September, 2001 or October, 2023. Anything before did not matter, they were not paying attention, they didn’t need to. Because the history beyond those dates did not impact, was not visually alluring. History is dead in the West.
Osama Bin Laden understood that, he and his band of killers could not defeat the empire head on. They were too few. But the reaction would bring thousands to their cause. With every dead child, murdered woman, boot on the ground, farmers and bakers would become warriors. The invaders and their proxies repelled. The US and it’s allies look to General Petraeus and proclaim his doctrine as genius, though he and his forces were defeated by those who do not have the luxury of war college or billions of dollars. They lost to those who had nothing to lose, who hated for ideological or personal reasons and to individuals who adapted. The US and it’s allies can sustain it’s hubris and lust for war because despite defeat, it’s never seemingly lost.
There is no occupation force, just much of the same. Though the defeat is eating inwards. Slowly, like the black fumes of burn pits, consuming the inside of empire. The allied nations are swollen with dependency, governments are so big that individuals and innovation are smothered, soon it will be impossible to wage wars let alone function. After all who will actually fight them? Bin Laden did not cause this, it’s a self inflicted infection but his war helped to spur it along.
Assad’s regime has fallen. The victors are terrorist. The terrorists who kicked off this ‘war on terror’. They are now ‘moderate rebels’ or whatever the current version is, ‘reformed insurgents’, ‘non-binary guerillas’ or ‘transcombatants’. Either way the government, that most people love, seems to love them. And already we see footage of torture and killings, anyone who is ideologically not in line with the new rulers must flee or likely die. Then again we are able to witness a genocide in Palestine and another Israeli attempt to destroy Lebanon. To discuss the murder of children is ‘antisemetic’.
The deranged son of a bitch did it. He won. That goofy looking rich kid Jihadist adventurer was victorious. That doesn’t mean the war is over. It’s never over. The wars will always go on. Those over there they know it too, they suffer it. In the West it may just be an inconvenience felt when prices go up or maybe it will come to our shores. The horrendous cycles of revenge, the next unwritten chapters of Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation. In this distorted age, perhaps if he was still alive, Osama Bin Laden would be a US ally again.
