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...
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 locking down of our own American world, where we were to cower in terror, while lashing out militarily.The second paragraph describes our CIA-created Gulag Archipelago. It is an emblem. If you choose to be proud of it, so be it. If not, fine.
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2 comments:
Very nice contribution to a discussion that it mostly empty of all meaning!
You're right: it is empty of meaning! It changes nothing!
It seems that only the empty things can get us worked up: the more inane and vapid, the more we flock to it.
Maybe I'm being a bit too crabby about things, though.
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