Diegetics

REGRETFULLY BOTH DID GREAT DAMAGE BUT UBL'S WAS MORE FUNDAMENTAL AND LONGER LASTING....

AS IN BELOW....



“Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy”, Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, 5 May 2011 — Excerpt:


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.

Admittedly, the Arab world had largely left bin Laden in the dust 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 has written, “little more than a historical footnote,” and his dreams are now essentially meaningless.

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, don’t release any photos, and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighborhood.

… Don’t be surprised, then, that in these last months or even years 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. 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.”

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



OUCH

painful to read

much less ponder

Correction

not me but my highly steerable fellow citizens who were easily misled into foreign military adventures

by Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle/Feith to avenge 911

which yours truly kept pointing out was not an act of war requiring retaliatory invasions

but a criminal act of a criminal gang that the entire civilized world would assist the US

in solving, apprehending, adjudicating and incarcerating the guilty.


The goodwill that streamed towards the US from virtually every nation

was not taken advantage of but squandered by oil patch idiots

and Likudnik moles whose names will go down in history books

as subversives who put their interests ahead of the American soldiers

they sacrificed for only their own gain

but which the fates have turned

into ashes in their mouths.