film’s wizard rather than the wicked witch. After all, he was, in a sense, a small man behind a vast screen on which his frail frame took on, in the United States, the hulking proportions of a supervillain, if not a rival superpower. In actuality, al-Qaeda, his organization, was, at best, a ragtag crew that, even before it was embattled and on the run, had the most limited of operational capabilities. Yes, it could mount spectacularly murderous actions, but only one of them every year or two.
Bin Laden was never “Hitler,” nor were his henchmen the Nazis, nor did they add up to Stalin and his minions. The nearest thing al-Qaeda had to a state was the impoverished, ravaged, Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan where some of its camps were once sheltered. Even the money available to bin Laden, while significant, wasn’t much to brag about. The 9/11 attacks were estimated to cost $400,000 to $500,000, which in superpower terms is pure chump change.
Despite the apocalyptic look of the destruction bin Laden’s followers caused in New York and at the Pentagon, he and his crew of killers represented a relatively modest, distinctly non-world-ending challenge to the United States. And had the Bush administration focused the same energies on hunting him down that it put into invading and occupying Afghanistan and then Iraq, can there be any question that almost ten years wouldn’t have passed before he was killed or, as will now never happen, was brought to trial?
It was our misfortune and Osama bin Laden’s good luck that Washington’s dreams were not those of a global policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation to justice, but of an imperial power whose leaders wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet down for decades to come. After all, while bin Laden only had the ability to launch major operations every couple of years, Washington—with almost unlimited amounts of money, weapons, and troops at its command—was capable of launching operations every day.
In a sense, after 9/11, bin Laden commanded Washington by taking possession of its deepest fears and desires and turning them to his own ends, the way a bot takes over a computer. It was he who ensured that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would be put into motion. It was he who also ensured that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be launched. It was he who brought America’s Afghan War to Pakistan, and American aircraft, bombs, and missiles to Somalia and Yemen to fight that Global War on Terror. And for the last near-decade, he did all this the way a Tai Chi master fights: using not his own minimal strength but our massive destructive power to create the sort of mayhem in which he undoubtedly imagined that an organization like his could thrive.
Don’t be surprised, then, that prior to his death, bin Laden seems to have been sequestered in a walled compound in a resort area just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to nothing. Think of him as practicing the Tao of Terrorism. And the less he did, the fewer operations he was capable of launching, the more the American military did for him in creating what collapsing Chinese dynasties used to call “chaos under heaven.”
Dead and Alive
As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others). In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years thereafter. As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be bin Laden’s monument, and our imperial graveyard.
Now that the celebrations and partying over his death have long faded, we are once again left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it’s easier to see
Bin Laden was never “Hitler,” nor were his henchmen the Nazis, nor did they add up to Stalin and his minions. The nearest thing al-Qaeda had to a state was the impoverished, ravaged, Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan where some of its camps were once sheltered. Even the money available to bin Laden, while significant, wasn’t much to brag about. The 9/11 attacks were estimated to cost $400,000 to $500,000, which in superpower terms is pure chump change.
Despite the apocalyptic look of the destruction bin Laden’s followers caused in New York and at the Pentagon, he and his crew of killers represented a relatively modest, distinctly non-world-ending challenge to the United States. And had the Bush administration focused the same energies on hunting him down that it put into invading and occupying Afghanistan and then Iraq, can there be any question that almost ten years wouldn’t have passed before he was killed or, as will now never happen, was brought to trial?
It was our misfortune and Osama bin Laden’s good luck that Washington’s dreams were not those of a global policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation to justice, but of an imperial power whose leaders wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet down for decades to come. After all, while bin Laden only had the ability to launch major operations every couple of years, Washington—with almost unlimited amounts of money, weapons, and troops at its command—was capable of launching operations every day.
In a sense, after 9/11, bin Laden commanded Washington by taking possession of its deepest fears and desires and turning them to his own ends, the way a bot takes over a computer. It was he who ensured that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would be put into motion. It was he who also ensured that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be launched. It was he who brought America’s Afghan War to Pakistan, and American aircraft, bombs, and missiles to Somalia and Yemen to fight that Global War on Terror. And for the last near-decade, he did all this the way a Tai Chi master fights: using not his own minimal strength but our massive destructive power to create the sort of mayhem in which he undoubtedly imagined that an organization like his could thrive.
Don’t be surprised, then, that prior to his death, bin Laden seems to have been sequestered in a walled compound in a resort area just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to nothing. Think of him as practicing the Tao of Terrorism. And the less he did, the fewer operations he was capable of launching, the more the American military did for him in creating what collapsing Chinese dynasties used to call “chaos under heaven.”
Dead and Alive
As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others). In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years thereafter. As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be bin Laden’s monument, and our imperial graveyard.
Now that the celebrations and partying over his death have long faded, we are once again left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it’s easier to see
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