The Contestants in the Sandbox -- Osama Bin Laden
There was a moneyman in 1930's Germany that few would have heard of. His name was Hjalmar Schacht, and he wound up in the dock at Nuremberg with Goering and the others. Yet, instead of being hanged, he was acquitted, quite possibly because he had given Hitler a bit of sass ...such as desiring to see his death. Yet, without Schacht the Nazis would have had a tough time starting the Second World War, because he was the man who came up with all sorts of tricks to finance German rearmament. Have you ever wondered, following their incredible inflation of the 1920's, when Germans had to lug along a whole suitcase of cash just to buy a quart of milk, how they got the money to build such a tremendous war machine just a few years later? Well, I don't know how they did that either, but there it is ...was.
My feeling is that Osama Bin Laden was mainly a latterday Schacht. He was the principal al-Quaida patron, and as such, his desires carried great weight, but he was not the strategist who picked out the targets and drew up the plan, or the man who carried out the plan. But -- provided that he is still alive -- he is undoubtedly pleased to be getting all the discredit that angry Americans have bestowed on him.
The search for him goes on, though, unfortunately for our ego and our sense of retribution, there is really nothing that can be done to Osama Bin Laden that can begin to compensate for the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks. We may take some satisfaction if he is at last apprehended, but the very cold and painful fact is that even if he were to be shot tomorrow he would die deliriously happy, because from his point of view, his victory, besides having been declared to be largely his alone, was complete long ago. And that's not all.
The twin towers were brought down, accompanied by a huge loss of life, with a thoroughness that neither he nor his co-conspirators could have foreseen, and at not that much cost in money or lives to him. But additionally Bin Laden can feel that the current U.S. leaders have augmented "his" victory. He can think that they've used "his" act to set the U.S. well on the way to imprisoning its own self inside walls erected against the rest of a formerly friendly world. They've done this by such means as the repressive Patriot Act, maintaining concentration camps overseas, hardening its borders against its harmless neighbors, and invading, threatening, or bullying a long series of other countries. Weirdly, even the capture of Saddam Hussein served Bin Laden's purposes, because he saw Saddam as being a traitor to Islam.
It is good for our health and our outlook that the obsession with Bin Laden has lightened some, because, by some strange aberration in the way that events have arranged themselves, as set into motion by the types in the Oval Office, the harder we've tried to take away from him -- mainly his life -- the more we've given him, and there is absolutely nothing that he can or will give us in return, except added grief.
People like to think that 9/11 created an epoch that is unique in history, and that's true, though not because of the scale of the disaster. More people died and more destruction was caused in a single day or night by a number of bombing raids in the Second World War. But no event -- in particular the situation of Osama Bin Laden -- has ever so clearly shown the essential emptiness and perils of revenge.
My feeling is that Osama Bin Laden was mainly a latterday Schacht. He was the principal al-Quaida patron, and as such, his desires carried great weight, but he was not the strategist who picked out the targets and drew up the plan, or the man who carried out the plan. But -- provided that he is still alive -- he is undoubtedly pleased to be getting all the discredit that angry Americans have bestowed on him.
The search for him goes on, though, unfortunately for our ego and our sense of retribution, there is really nothing that can be done to Osama Bin Laden that can begin to compensate for the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks. We may take some satisfaction if he is at last apprehended, but the very cold and painful fact is that even if he were to be shot tomorrow he would die deliriously happy, because from his point of view, his victory, besides having been declared to be largely his alone, was complete long ago. And that's not all.
The twin towers were brought down, accompanied by a huge loss of life, with a thoroughness that neither he nor his co-conspirators could have foreseen, and at not that much cost in money or lives to him. But additionally Bin Laden can feel that the current U.S. leaders have augmented "his" victory. He can think that they've used "his" act to set the U.S. well on the way to imprisoning its own self inside walls erected against the rest of a formerly friendly world. They've done this by such means as the repressive Patriot Act, maintaining concentration camps overseas, hardening its borders against its harmless neighbors, and invading, threatening, or bullying a long series of other countries. Weirdly, even the capture of Saddam Hussein served Bin Laden's purposes, because he saw Saddam as being a traitor to Islam.
It is good for our health and our outlook that the obsession with Bin Laden has lightened some, because, by some strange aberration in the way that events have arranged themselves, as set into motion by the types in the Oval Office, the harder we've tried to take away from him -- mainly his life -- the more we've given him, and there is absolutely nothing that he can or will give us in return, except added grief.
People like to think that 9/11 created an epoch that is unique in history, and that's true, though not because of the scale of the disaster. More people died and more destruction was caused in a single day or night by a number of bombing raids in the Second World War. But no event -- in particular the situation of Osama Bin Laden -- has ever so clearly shown the essential emptiness and perils of revenge.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 7:30 AM
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