Osama Bin Laden's Unlikely Victory

I've often said that on the evening of the "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad in 2003, Osama bin Laden must have been the happiest man on the planet.

Tomgram: Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 9:27am, May 5, 2011.
Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy

How Osama bin Laden goaded the world's sole superpower into bankruptcy and defeat.

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 to $500,000, which in superpower terms was pure chump change.

However, it wasn't necessary to compete financially with the United States: all it took was the provocation to goad the bellicose superpower into massive overreach in retaliation.

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 into 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.

Osama bin Laden transformed American society, and the world:

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 locking down of our own American world, where we were to cower in terror, while lashing out militarily.

If only a more cerebral, more thoughtful administration had been in place in Washington -- under President Obama, for instance, or President Gore -- how different would the world be today?

Those chants 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 picked up a bullhorn 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.