by Randolph T. Holhut
Chief of AR Correspondents
Dummerston, Vt.
May 4, 2011
BIN LADEN'S DEAD. CAN WE END THIS WAR NOW, PLEASE?
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DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Osama bin Laden is dead.
Does this mean we can leave Iraq and Afghanistan now?
Does this mean we can close our prison in Guantánamo Bay?
Does this mean we won't have to get poked, prodded and groped when we want to get on an airliner?
Does this mean we can stop having our mails looked at and our phone calls listened to by the government?
Does this mean the President no longer needs those extra powers that circumvent the Constitution and allow him to unilaterally decide to attack any nation deemed to be a threat to the United States?
Does this mean an end to "extraordinary rendition," "black sites," "enhanced interrogation techniques," and other assorted acts by our government that violate international law.
Does this mean the so-called Global War on Terror is over?
The answer is clear. Of course not.
As we've seen over the past two years, President Barack Obama has done almost nothing to dismantle the national security state that President George W. Bush established. The members of the Bush Administration that signed off on torture, an invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, and a wide-ranging regime of illegal secret wiretapping and surveillance on U.S. citizens have not been brought to justice.
So while I am glad to see the death of the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, I know that the jubilation this news has brought the nation will be short-lived.
The deaths of thousands of Americans in New York and Washington that day has been avenged, but the empty chairs at the dinner tables of so many homes still remain empty.
And those empty chairs have been joined by the thousands of empty chairs of U.S. service men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And those empty chairs have joined by the hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghan civilians who have been killed in those two wars.
Our nation got suckered into a vast quagmire in the Middle East though a combination of imperial hubris and obsession over bin Laden and al-Qaida. And the damage that was done to our country, and its standing in the world, is incalculable.
"We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence," said Chris Hedges on Sunday upon hearing the news of bin Laden's death. "These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation -- the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire."
But in a way, bin Laden was already dead before the Americans got to him. Look at the events of the past few months in the Arab world. Who was the inspiration for the secular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that toppled those nations' respective dictators. It wasn't bin Laden. It was Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor who chose to set himself on fire after being harassed by corrupt local police.
That act let loose the pent-up energy of young Arabs from Tunis to Tehran who wanted a better life and were willing risk everything, including their lives, to achieve it. This energy did what bin Laden and al-Qaida could do, topple governments. The nihilism of the Islamic radicals has little appeal for these young people.
That's the hopeful sign we can take away from bin Laden's death. We have an opportunity to end the "global war on terror," and to stop defining our decade-long struggle against stateless terrorists as a "war." We have the opportunity to bring our forces home from Iraq and Afghanistan. We have the opportunity to choose another path, a path that rejects the actions that have committed in our names since 9/11 and to replace war with justice, equality, and respect for other nations.
Will President Obama and his Administration have to courage to do this?
Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.
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