This post is strictly own opinion. It does not represent the views of any organization.
The day that many have long awaited has finally arrived. Late Sunday evening, President Obama announced that mass-murdering terrorist Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan. There’s something disturbing about celebrating the death of a fellow human being even though he was indeed responsible for unspeakable acts. It seems more civilized to be grateful that many relatives of the victims of 9/11 are able to seek closure in the healing process.
As philosopher George Santayana stated “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” One cannot fully understand the motives behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks without understanding the nature of the enemy. The United States government has a long messy history with Osama bin Laden. During the Soviet War in Afghanistan which began in 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supplied the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of modern weapons and funds. The head of the Afghan mujahideen was a radical by the name of Osama bin Laden. According to Middle Eastern analyst Hazhir Teimourian, Osama bin Laden even received security training from the CIA itself. The bloody and costly Soviet War in Afghanistan lasted over nine years with Osama bin Laden’s group declaring victory. The bankrupt Soviet War collapsed shortly afterwards.
Osama bin Laden returned to his homeland of Saudi Arabia after the war. Using the funds supplied by the United States government, he formed his terrorist group Al-Qaeda. In August 1990, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait. The United States intervened by placing U.S. troops on the Saudi Arabia peninsula. Osama bin Laden was outraged that foreign troops were on the same land as the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He then turned against the United States government that had previously funded him. Even Former Deputy of Defense Secretary of Paul Wolfowitz stated that “if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina… Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda.”
Government policies generally have unintended consequences. The U.S. government’s foreign policy is no exception to that rule. Foreign policy experts use the word “blowback” to describe the consequences of meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries. The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East parallels with the movie Frankenstein. In the classic novel, Dr. Frankenstein with seemingly decent intentions creates a creature that ends up seeking revenge against him. Osama bin Laden along with Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak are monsters created by U.S. foreign-policy makers. The U.S. government should have minded its own business and not funded these mass-murderers in the first place. A witty Facebook status making its rounds says “us praising the U.S. government for killing Osama is like the villagers praising Dr. Frankenstein for killing his own monster.”
Let’s make one thing clear: the American people are not to blame for 9/11. Not a single innocent person deserved to die on the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The American people instead do not deserve to be put in harm’s way by their government’s policies decided upon by the elite few in Washington, D.C. Society and government are two different entities. We are less safe and prone to terrorist attacks due to our government intervening in complicated situations overseas that it does not fully comprehend.
The death of Osama bin Laden has emotional significance. The sad part is that it isn’t likely to change our policy in the Middle East. The federal government told the American people that its main purpose in Afghanistan was to find Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda members. Nearly ten years later, Bin Laden has been killed, the Taliban regime has been removed and there are fewer than 100 Al-Qaeda members left in Afghanistan. When exactly can U.S. troops come home to their families?
I hate to be a buzz kill but let’s put everything into perspective. The U.S. government killed one man. It took them nine years, seven months and twenty days. They declared war on two countries supposedly in order to find bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction. Neither was found in Afghanistan or Iraq. Many of our civil liberties have been eroded through unconstitutional measures such as the so-called Patriot Act and the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) invasive procedures since 9/11. These wars have ended up costing taxpayers trillions of dollars over budget. The death toll for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon top 6,000 dead. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been murdered. Many of these causalities are small defenseless children. Can you possibly see how these innocent deaths could create hatred and increase membership in terrorist organizations? Just imagine if your child was killed by a bomb dropped by a foreign government invading your country and tell me what you would do.
Here’s the kicker: Osama bin Laden death was not due to the war in Afghanistan. He was killed by a small hit-team. The same type of hit-team that Dr. Ron Paul proposed multiple times first called the September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001. He maintained that bringing Osama bin Laden to justice would only require a small elite force and not a full scale costly invasion. For years, Dr. Ron Paul has stated that “Pakistan is probably where Osama bin Laden is.” Yet, Dr. Paul was mocked for proposing a hit team and saying Osama bin Laden was being protected by the government of Pakistan.
It is a relief that Osama bin Laden is no longer at large. In a Foreign Policy article, Gartenstein-Ross says that “for example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujaheddin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, ‘continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’ ” In many ways, Osama bin Laden won. America is now left with bigger debt and less liberty. U.S. deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan has surpassed the 9/11 death toll by at least twice. Has it all been worth it? The real celebration will be when the troops finally come home and our civil liberties are restored.
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In a word, no.
No, you cannot bring the troops home, we cannot simply abandon our middle east policy, no we cannot simply pull all of our troops home, no we can’t just close our borders and ignore what is happening in the rest of the world.
America is at a crossroads, we can either cede global control to the Chinese and wait to be overrun, or we can fight to maintain our hegemony through defending our interrsts and force all who would challenge us to fear for their lives. America was once a great nation and to be a great nation again we must work to be able to impress our will on other nations.
Sure we made Saddam and Osama, but for quite some time they did our bidding, and once they stopped we eventually punished them harshly. If anything the lesson we should draw from their stories is to spank impertinent children earlier and harder.
Hi. I saw you on twitter. I love your blog. You are absolutely right about the U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia being the catalyst for Osama Bin Laden turning against us. Keep it up!
Adam
Julie, I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. I would only take exception to the premise that OBL was responsible for 9/11. The MSM, along with recent presidential admins, have continued to blame 9/11 on OBL without substantial proof. In fact, the FBI’s own rap sheet for OBL doesn’t include 9/11… http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/usama-bin-laden
Bin Laden also used the suffering of the Iraqi people from the U.N. sanctions on Iraq (U.S. was a principal supporter) as a reason to attack the U.S. Although the intent of the sanctions was to enfeeble the regime and the nation’s leader, President Saddam Hussein, throughout the 12-year period Hussein enjoyed life in his extravagant palaces and aboard his 269-foot yaught. Sadly, the only ill effects of the U.N. sanctions was on the Iraqi people.
The U.N. sanctions dramatically debilitated Iraq’s economy. UNICEF, for example, contends that the sanctions led to the deaths of over a million Iraqis, including over half a million children due to malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, and diseases caused by a lack of clean water and chlorine. Dennis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, resigned in protest, saying: “I don’t want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.”
In America, the former head of the United Nations Special Commission, Lt. Scott Ritter, claims the sanctions were “felt by 22 million innocent Iraqi people, not by the leadership, not by Saddam Hussein, not by his cronies.” Former House Democratic Minority Whip David Bonier called the policy: “infanticide masquerading as policy.”
Bin Laden’s case was made for him in 1996 by then U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Madeline Albright during an interview with CBS news 60 minutes reporter Leslie Stall. Stall asked Albright this question: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it? Albright callously replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” While this statement got little play in the West, and few Americans even know about the effects of the sanctions, it has been played adnosioum in the Arab world.
Similarly, when former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Bill Richardson was challenged in 2005 by Voice Of America’s Amy Goodman, “Do you think the price was worth it, 500,000 children dead?” without challenging the premise of the question, Richardson deadpanned: “Well, I believe our policy was correct, yes.”
Another reason for the animosity is what the Islamists see as unbridled support for Israel in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. The U.S. plays into the hands of bin Laden here. In making the case for the invasion of Iraq, President Bush excoriated Hussein for violating UN Security Council Resolutions requiring disarmament. Yet neither he nor his predecessor Bill Clinton condemned Israel for their continued violation of Security Council resolution 242 which calls on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, or resolutions 446 and 465 that require Israel to withdraw from illegal settlements on occupied Arab lands. This perceived double-standard breeds indignation in the Muslim World.
Combining the effects of the U.N. sanctions on the Iraqi people with his view of the oppression of the Palestinian people, bin Ladin complains: “For God’s sake, what are the documents that incriminate the Palestinian people that warrant massacres against them, which have been going on for more than five decades at the hands of the Crusaders and the Jews. What is the evidence against the people of Iraq to warrant their blockade and being killed in a way that is unprecedented in history?”
History teaches us that our involvement in the affairs of other nations can lead to tragic unintended tragic consequences One recent example is the end result of the U.S.-British sponsored coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 after he nationalized oil fields. The Coup restored Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, the “Shaw of Iran” to power. Under the Shaw’s iron-fisted rule, secret police tortured and killed political opponents. Fed up with his oppressive rule, the supporters of fundamentalist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power in 1979. Still inflamed at the U.S. for it’s role in the coup, Iranian students took 52 American diplomats hostage and held them for 444 days.
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Nice, well written, well done. There are entirely too many Americans who refuse to look more than one level into something. And, there are entirely too many Politicians who will pander to those Americans. Hopefully in ’12 we will turn part of that corner. Feel free to drop by my place on the web, link at twitter profile, and we will do virtual coffee. LOL