Is Osama bin Laden Winning After All?
Here’s something from Simon Jenkins’ blog on Huffington Post.
This has seemed clear to me since at least the initiation of the Iraq War, which distracted the US from bin Laden and, along with tax cuts, sucked the financial resources out of the nation’s treasury. What is not mentioned here is that bin Laden would also like to see the US go broke, in an expensive domestic conflagration, which is merely fighting shadows on the wall. Once weakened by tied-up forces in Iraq, and deeply in debt, it would be easy to come back and pick a weak spot for attack. The culture of jihad measures revenge by the century, when Americans forget who shot who last week (it was Dick Cheney). Waiting 10 years (from 9/11) for a major attack on a weakened adversary would not be a long time for them. Since then, our political “leaders” have done all the heavy lifting for bin Laden, reducing our civil liberties (remember those freedoms the enemy supposedly hated?) to ashes of the Constitution, which Bush, the American president himself, recently called “just a goddamned piece of paper.” In my view, bin Laden won decisively at that point. Our government is clearly no longer of the people.
There never was a “terrorist threat” to western civilisation or democracy, only to western lives and property. The threat becomes systemic only when democracy loses its confidence and when its leaders are weak, as now. Terror attacks are for the police. For Bush and Blair to demand a “long war” against bin Laden and, by implication, a long suppression of civil liberty is ludicrous. Western civilisation is not some simpering weakling that cowers before a fanatic’s might, pleading for leaders to protect it by all means, however illegal. It has been proof against Islamic expansionism since the 15th century. It is not at risk.
The American president and the British prime minister have spent half a decade exploiting bin Laden for political ends, in thrall to their security/industrial complex. They have relied on terrifying their electorates with new and bloodcurdling threats, with what Runciman calls “spook politics”. But they will pass. The half-baked “message” laws passed by Britain’s limp parliament last week will fall in disuse. The vitality of British and American democracy has always been its ability to produce antibodies when truly challenged by an internal or external menace. The west will rediscover its self-belief and restore the liberalism, properly defined as freedom, it once exemplified to the world.
- Posted by Pete for USTV Media
