The real story is Al-Qaeda chief managed to evade the powerful arm of the empire for 11 years
By Aijaz Zaka Syed / Arab News
Osama not Obama
SO America has finally managed to kill the monster it had created. And in one of those ironies that fate throws up, Bin Laden met his end at the hands of someone whose name has often been confused with his own. In his death, Bin Laden hasn’t just saved the struggling US president; he may have gifted his nemesis a second term in office.
But can you really kill men like OBL? He was not just another human being, a man of flesh and blood like you and me. Rather, he represented an idea. And you can’t kill ideas — even if you happen to be the most powerful nation on the planet and have the deadliest of arms man has invented at your disposal.
The long crippled man who spurned a life of obscene luxury to live on the run forever like a hunted animal, had to go the way he did. There’s hardly a surprise there. The real story and feat lies in the fact that the Al-Qaeda chief managed to evade the long and powerful arms of the empire for so long — for 11 long years.
While the “coalition of the willing” hunted the most wanted man on the planet all across the wild frontier stretching from Pakistan’s Northwest to the Afghan border with Russia, he ostensibly lived right in the heart of the Abbottabad cantonment, a stone’s throw away from Pakistan’s elite Kakul Military Academy.
What an extraordinary, extraordinary story! And what chutzpah, what masterstroke of the evil genius that Bin Laden was!
And what embarrassment for Pakistan’s leaders! They haven’t been just caught unawares; they’ve been found with their pants down. The country has become the laughing stock of the whole world. It’s damned if it admits that this was a one-sided US operation and it had no clue whatsoever until US choppers with their elite commandos barged right into the heart of the cantonment and took out their man. It’s damned if it suggests otherwise.
How’s it possible for the world’s most hunted man with a $50 million bounty on his head to live next to a military base close to Islamabad and go unnoticed by Pakistan’s fabled sleuths? These are disturbing questions that no one seems to have any answers for.
Whoever is responsible for this mess, they’ve put Pakistan in a rather nice spot, perhaps like never before in its history. The ever voracious and vicious television networks across the border haven’t stopped partying since. It’s the great Pakistan barbecue season all over again.
All his life Bin Laden had been an enigma and a perpetual source of concern to his distinguished clan and the land of his birth. Now he has visited a calamity on the folks who hosted and worked with him during the glorious decade of the Afghan jihad.
Lest we forget the commander of the faithful in that “holy war” against the so-called “Evil Empire” was none other than the leader of the free world. Uncle Sam headed the Western coalition as he does now. Pakistan was only their second lieutenant, a facilitator if you will. Only when the music stopped, Pakistan was left holding the baby. Everyone went home and it had to live with the mess that was left behind. Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, Taleban and the whole rag-tag army of various other groups are a blast from the past that the West doesn’t want to have anything to do with today.
When the tide turned after 9/11 and Pakistan went with the flow, the chickens came home to roost. Bin Laden came home to where he thought he belonged. His final suicide mission was to blow up his former friends and the land that sheltered him.
However, the ultimate victim of the misguided missile that the billionaire Bin Laden fired had been the faith that he claimed to champion. He brought nothing but disgrace and disaster to Muslim lands and fellow believers. More Muslims than the Westerners or Christians and Jews have died as a direct consequence of Al-Qaeda attacks, or by those that were inspired by his murderous ideology. A noble religion of 1.6 billion believers has come to be condemned as a death cult, with all Arabs and Muslims being tarred as terrorists. For which Bin Laden will not perhaps be ever forgiven by Muslims.
Yet you can’t help a twinge of sadness at the tragic end Bin Laden has met — far from the land of his birth that he so loved. He was driven by the belief — hopelessly distorted as it was — that he was fighting to free Muslim lands and for justice for the Palestinians, Afghans and for the oppressed everywhere.
Muslims never identified with OBL or condoned his appalling crimes. They, however, understood what forced a quiet young man to kick his billion-dollar fortune and take up arms. He struck a chord in not just Arabs and Muslims but in the dispossessed everywhere by taking on the big bullies who have killed more innocents and wreaked more destruction on our world than a million Bin Ladens could have managed in their life time.
Besides, the way this whole charade has been played out with President Obama and his aides “coolly” watching the action live in real time as if it was a baseball game, and his body being dumped into the Arabian Sea has only added to their disgust and outrage. Using all that overwhelming force to kill an unarmed, ailing man without a trial. So much for America’s fabled justice system and due process!
Shouldn’t Bin Laden have been put on the trial for the crimes he has been accused of? What was the hurry to buy him at sea? What was it that America was trying to cover? And how’s Obama’s justice different from the “dead-or-alive” cowboy retribution of his predecessor?
But dead or alive, we haven’t heard the last of this yet. Bin Laden may be dead and gone; his cause is not. Others will take his place and may already have. If the world is to prevent the rise of more Bin Ladens, it must take its scalpel to the festering cancer of injustice and oppression in the Holy Land. Now that the so-called architect of 9/11 is gone, the US has no pretext or business to be in Afghanistan-Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Bin Laden has taken with him to his watery grave the West’s raison d’être for its imperial project in the Muslim world.
Aijaz Zaka Syed is a widely published opinion editor, he looks at and comments on world affairs from a Middle Eastern and Arab-Muslim perspective. He received the European Union’s prestigious Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize in 2007 for his writings on the Darfur conflict. He has been a frequent contributor to My Catbird Seat. Write to him at aijaz.syed@hotmail.com
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no no no no no, Mr. Syed. wrong.
You know as well as I know, that Osama Bin Laden died in the mountainous region of Pakistan on December 13, 2001. If you can call renal failure due to no ability to get dialysis a ‘natural cause’ then that’s what killed him.
you also know that this b.s. the U.S. government is putting out there is just that, a bunch of bullshit…truly.
don’t legitimize this crap by making it sound plausible that Osama evaded capture for 11 years when he was dead in a grave resting in peace.
what was evading capture in the world was the TRUTH, that’ what evaded and STILL EVADES US today.
TRUTH. simple TRUTH.
So America has finally managed to kill the monster it had created. And in one of those ironies that fate throws up, Bin Laden met his end at the hands of someone whose name has often been confused with his own.
Yes… 9-ll… chickens coming home to roost… the price of bumbling, bungling messing about in foreign affairs which are of no interest to anyone in America and solely supportive of Israeli interests… and an Arab “patriot” and Reaganite “Freedom Fighter,” is killed by the hand which created him.
“The hand which giveth is the hand which taketh.”
And, in an even greater irony of fate, like Pat Tillman and probably many others, another young idealist has been killed by the very institution whose lofty ideals he naively set out to defend.
One more question: Did Osama actually “evade” those hunters for 11 years, or did they deliberately “not find” him as long as he was still a valuable CIA asset in his role as “bogeyman” and “justification” for the murderous ten year “hunt” for him until, his “best use by date” expired, they took him off the shelf and disposed of him like a used condom… casually thrown into the sea.
An even greater irony of fate might be that both he and “the other,” whose names are so easily confused, were both the patsy’s and puppets of forces which each of them found more powerful than either of them could handle… much more powerful and deadly than anyone could have imagined.
His advice to America and Americans was sound…. something which every American should have listened to and heeded, had the US Government and the US Mainstream Media and Misinformation Industry not hidden from them.
For more follow-up, read: The American Awakening – Can It Happen Here? at http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/05/the-american-awakening-can-it-happen-here/
Earlaiman
I think you’re missing the boat, Earl.
the boat left without you.
the real boat’s crew was a coup by SecDef Gates and SecSTATE Clinton, what I call the ‘E Tu ROBERT’ moment for O’bummer.
I articulate it by asking you all to take a look at the staged photo op shot of the gang in the situation room looking at blank and non op laptops and a blank screen in front of them.
Look at Gates face real hard. The look of cheshire cat satisfaction is so evident that it almost obliterates the rest of the crap in the room, even outshines the look of mock ‘oh no’ on Hillary’s hand over mouth gesture’d face.
What you are witnessing in this photo is the POLITICAL ASSASSINATION OF A PRESIDENT, whether your brains can handle it or not.
SecDEF Gates has the power to make arcane and obscure deals with the Pakistani ISI, more or less without full approval of the president.
Now, put on your thinking caps here and think real hard; “QUI BONO” or who benefits from this utter clusterfork and goat rope?
Now look at Gates again. And O’bummer.
The DINOCRATIC PARTY absolutely knows that they cannot under any circumstances run O’Puppet in the 2012 race without absolutely another blood bath, especially now.
Though SHILLARY has yet to throw her conniving hat into the ring, don’t you think that the DINOCRATS have virtually zero chance of winning even a rigged election, if they run this puppet, now that this obvious fraud on the entire population of the earth has taken place?
Gates and Clintonstoned have essentially murdered O’bummer, politically. If you look at his face in this picture, he’s thinking; “Man, did I get the shiv here..”
I have no use for O’Puppet, and I know that this whole thing was non reality from the git go.
but ask yourself this; “why so badly botch this in ways that defy explanation?”
the only answer is that this was the moment that this very badly acting puppet got his ass handed to him by two subordinates who absolutely do not want Caribou Barbie to be the next president of the United States.
This was teflon coated HILLARY CLINTONSTONED at her finest hour, folks.
it was he de-facto announcement that she will be seeking the DINOCRATIC PARTY nomination for the 2012 race.
and I think she’ll get it.
as for Osama, he should be eulogized for having been the very best patsy ever denied medical care for kidney failure, while on a civil service payroll job with CIA.
As he had absolutely NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE MOSSAD OPERATION OF 9/11, except to be the CIA cover story for HIGH TREASON of the United States Government that day, may he rest in peace.
No, 9-11, I did not miss the look on all of those faces, nor the hangdog, weary, worn and bedraggled look on the little wet terrier sitting slouched over there in the upper LH quadrant of the photo.
A loser, lost in water over his head if I ever saw one!
I used to pitch baseball at one time in one of my earlier lives a long, long time ago, and I learned that, when you are pitching to a bunch of poor hitters, the equivalent of semi-literate readers in this simile, that you do not throw too much of your good stuff or too many “junkballs,” for it tends to confuse them,and one of them might accidentally hit the ball.
In this case too many junk pitches would fly right by the intellectual batting average of the average readers of these pages, but they would still get a “steal” when the catcher dropped the ball.
Thanks for bringing out “the rest of the picture,” anyway. It is a story well-told!
Yes, we just might be looking at a Gates/Clinton, but more likely a Clinton/Gates ticket methinks.
Earlaiman