If it’s true that Osama bin Laden died of a “waterborne illness” last month, as is looking fairly credible, I can’t help but think of the ending to War of the Worlds. Remember how humans weren’t saved from the Martians by firepower or strategy, but by disease microbes?
If Osama is dead, and not by anything Bush and his minions can claim credit for, then what next?
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians — DEAD! — slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds.
Gives me goosebumps, or makes me laugh bitterly, or both. If Osama is dead, and not by anything Bush and his minions can claim credit for, then what next?
We’ve been playing Whack-a-Mole for five years now, as the Bush administration identifies an endless stream of second-in-commands. We are usually introduced to them as they are captured or killed, but in a few weeks or months, new ones with similar names replace them. And none of it brings us any closer to some kind of ending in this fight.
So if bin Laden is dead, has in fact been dead for awhile now, then why are still at it? All along, we have accepted the Bush-given view that if we just kill all the “evil-doers,” especially the leaders, the problem’s solved. Could it be maybe, just maybe, the solution was never extermination? As George Lakoff and Evan Frisch pointed out in a brilliant Buzzflash guest contribution, declaring war on terror[ists] was a dumb strategy.
To Osama bin Laden, the moral was simple: American power can be used against America itself. This moral has defined the post 9/11 world: the more America uses military force in the Middle East, the more damage is done to America and Americans.
The more Americans kill and terrorize Muslims, the more we recruit Muslims to become terrorists and fight against us.
The war in Iraq was over in 2003 when the US forces defeated Saddam’s army. Then the American occupation began…
If bin Laden is dead, I can’t wait to hear what our new goal is morphed into by the folks who are profiting from all this carnage. But rest assured, a new one there will be. The question is, will we keep accepting it?
