Getting the 'bad guy'
This endless
politically symbolic war narrative needed a "victory," especially for
the home front funding it. Just as the killing of Saddam Hussein
provided an epiphany in the Iraq war, the dramatic killing of bin Laden
put the icing on the cake in Afghanistan.
The US' brave big-game
hunters finally got the "bad guy." Even if the killings did not make
that situation any better from a US military point of view, it gave the
US bragging rights. In life (and on TV), these enemies became the face
of evil, propagandized as modern-day Hitlers.
In death -- and unable to talk back -- they became living symbols for
use in political campaigns. Saddam played that role for Bush, and now
Osama plays it for Obama.
There are still so many unanswered questions about bin Laden, his role and his liquidation, but the media has mostly moved on even as a stubborn and brilliant former investigative Pakistani military officer, Shaukat Qadir has not.
Qadir has spent thousands of his own money mounting a detailed investigation, which now appears in a Kindle monograph titled "Operation Geronimo: the Betrayal and Assassination of Osama bin Laden and its Aftermath." (Interesting how the killer Seals who iced bin Laden named their operation after a military campaign against a great Native American leader!)
His research led him to reveal that an ailing bin Laden was forced out by his own movement in 2003, and US Intelligence knew it.
I wrote to the former brigadier, who told me that's maybe why Bush had dismissed Osama as a threat.
He also told me:
"As you so perceptively observe, Obama needed a new threat. In the overall context, the perceived threat in the US is now from Islam. However, some countries/organisations need to be identified as the 'Enemy.' The assassination of OBL made Obama, like the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq did for Bush, a 'war-time' president. An image he is carefully nurturing since."The assassination of this pitiful wraith of a human being -- and mind you I have no love lost for OBL or al-Qaeda -- was celebrated in the US.
"Had his face been shown on the media, most decent American citizens would have been just as ashamed as they were when they saw Saddam being dug out of his hole, or when Gaddafi was killed."
Without going into all his details of the internal machinations, he believes there was another subtext to the operation...
"I believe that in this case this operation was not only politically motivated, it was part of a well-orchestrated psychological war to destroy the image of the Pakistan army."
A moral calamity
No wonder that Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, told the Senate in
2007 that the war on terror has become so overblown that it is "a mythical historical narrative." He called Iraq a "historic, strategic and moral calamity."
But that didn't stop either war. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz reported that $3-5 trillion had been spent on Iraq, and that it had
been very bad for a faltering American economy.
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