Tamin'ny taona 1960, ny senatera George Aiken avy any Vermont dia nanolotra filoha amerikana roa a drafitra momba ny ady amin'ny Vietnam: manambara fandresena ary mody. Tsy noraharahiana tanteraka tamin'izany fotoana izany, drafitra mendrika hodinihina indray androany ho an'ny ady any Afghanistan sy Pakistan amin'izao fahafolo taonany izao.
Araka ny efa fantatry ny rehetra tsy jamba, marenina ary moana, Osama bin Laden intsony. Literally. Avy amin'ny Navy Seals. Na toy ny iray tamin'ireo vahoaka nifaly niseho teo anoloan'ny Trano Fotsy ny alahady alina dia nametraka izany tamin'ny sora-baventy tsy nampoizina. The Wizard of Oz: “Ding, Dong, maty i Bin Laden.”
Ary tsy ho mora ve raha izy tokoa no mpamosavy ratsy fanahy tany Andrefana ary ny hany tokony hataonay dia ny manindry ireo kapa robina three times, say “there’s no place like home,” and be back in Kansas. Or if this were V-J day and a oroka tantsambo niteny daholo.
Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it’s an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it’s we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labeled the Global War on Terror.
Ekena fa nanana ny tontolo Arabo ny ankamaroany sisa bin Laden ao anaty vovoka even before he took that bullet to the head. There, the focus was on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely nonviolent protests that have shaken the region and its autocrats to their roots. In that part of the world, his death is, as Tony Karon of Time Magazine nanoratra, “mihoatra noho ny fanamarihana ambany pejy ara-tantara”, ary tsy misy dikany ankehitriny ny nofiny.
Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, aza avoaka sary rehetra, ary mbola hitohy toy ny matoatoa izy raha mbola manohy miady amin'ny ady mahafaty sy mampidi-doza any amin'ny manodidina azy taloha i Washington.
Tao amin'ny fampihorohoroana
Raha analogies ny The Wizard of Oz were in order, bin Laden might better be compared to that 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 U.S., 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 in its heyday, even before it was embattled and on the run, had the most limited of operational capabilities. Yes, it could mount spectacular and 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, though sometimes they were billed as such. 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, not on a superpower scale anyway. The 9/11 attacks were estimated to cost $ 400,000 amin'ny $ 500,000, izay amin'ny teny superpower dia fiovana chump madiodio.
Na eo aza izany Tranga mijery 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 U.S. 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 10 years wouldn’t have passed before he died or, as will now never happen, was brought to trial?
Ny loza nanjo anay sy Osama bin Laden tsara vintana fa ny nofinofin'i Washington dia tsy ny nofinofin'ny polisy manerantany mikasa ny hitondra hetsika heloka bevava eo amin'ny fitsarana, fa ny fahefana imperial izay tian'ny mpitarika azy. hanidy ny foiben-tsolika amin'ny planeta ho a Pax Americana for decades to come. So if you’re writing bin Laden's obituary right now, describe him as a wizard who used the 9/11 attacks to magnify his meager powers many times over.
After all, while he 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, the way a bot mandray an-tanana solosaina, ary mamadika azy ireo ho amin'ny farany.
Aza gaga àry fa tato anatin'ny volana vitsivitsy na taona maro lasa izay dia toa nalaina an-keriny i bin Laden. fitambarana misy rindrina in a resort area just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to nothing. Think of him as practicing the Tao of Terrorism. In fact, 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.”
Maty sy Velona
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) — from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the manidy ny tontolo amerikaninay manokana, izay nisy anay matahotra noho ny horohoro, sady nikapoka miaramila.
In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after. 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 his monument, and our imperial graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than one empire in the past).
Amin'izao fotoana izao rehefa mihetsiketsika tampoka amin'ny hetsika ara-tafika amerikana ny fampahalalam-baovao sy ny vahoaka amerikanina, dia mbola manana izany isika saika 100,000 Tafika amerikana, miaramila mpiara-dia 50,000, mpikarama an'ady mitam-piadiana, ary farafaharatsiny Basy miaramila 400 in Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organization which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 ho 100 mpiasa ao amin'io firenena io.
Ankehitriny, ofisialy izy ambanin’ny onja. In the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing future “caliphate” was the most ephemeral of fantasies. In a sense, though, his dominion was always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He possessed us.
Rehefa fankalazana ary fety noho ny fahafatesany, satria tsy latsak'izay haingana noho ny tamin'ny fampakaram-badin'ny mpanjaka britanika izy ireo, dia havela indray isika miaraka amin'ny tontolon'ny Amerikana rovitra izay tian'i bin Laden antsika, ary ho mora ny mahita ny zavatra tsy dia misy dikany loatra amin'ity " fandresena,” ny famonoana azy, efa ho 10 taona aty aoriana.
For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the talking heads chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished on American special ops forces, the president, his planners, and various intelligence outfits, this is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves, and what, in the course of that, we did, in the name of fighting him, amin'ny hafa.
Ireo hira of “USA! USA!” on the announcement of his death were but faint echoes of the ones at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, when President George W. Bush naka anjomara and promised “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” That would be the beginning of a brief few years of soaring American hubris and fantasies of domination wilder than those of any caliphate-obsessed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist, and soon enough they would leave us high and dry in our present world of dismal unemployment figures, rotting infrastructure, rising gas prices, troubled treasury, and a people on the edge.
Raha tsy hoe atokanantsika ny fanafihana ops manokana sy ny ady drone ary manararaotra, raha tsy vonona ny hanaraka ny ohatr'ireo mpanao fihetsiketsehana tsy misy herisetra rehetra manerana an'i Afovoany Atsinanana isika ary manomboka tena fisintahana marina sy haingana ao amin'ny teatra hetsika Af/Pak, dia tsy ho faty mihitsy i Osama bin Laden.
Tamin'ny 17 Septambra 2001, ny Filoha Bush nanontaniana whether he wanted bin Laden dead. He replied: “There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said ‘wanted dead or alive.’” Dead or alive. Now, it turns out that there was a third option. Dead and alive.
The chance exists to put a stake through the heart of Osama bin Laden’s American legacy. After all, the man who officially started it all is theoretically gone. We could declare victory, Toto, and head for home. But why do I think that, on this score, the malign wizard is likely to win?
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, where this article first appeared. His latest book,The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has recently been published. You can catch him discussing war American-style and his book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking Eto.