The Empire Strikes Back

The lust for blood is partially satiated. Osama-bin-Laden was shot at point blank range by the US Special Forces called Navy Seals in his mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan in front of his young daughter and one of his many wives. He was sick and almost immobile. The news sent many Americans in frenzy who poured on streets heady with vicarious feeling of power and dominance. Ground zero swelled with people with many flexing their muscles and chanting U-S-A, it was a revenge justified. The mainstream media covered the event with great enthusiasm and euphoria with ‘experts’ elated at the unique feat of killing one unarmed man. You can run but you cannot hide, the Empire sooner or later will hunt you down. Justice is now an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, blood for blood and lives for lives. We have receded into dark Middle Ages. The rule of law is only for the weak and powerless, it does not apply to the all powerful, highly militarized Empire and its cronies. The Empire can invade your land, kill people at will, take all resources and occupy as it pleases. In our unprecedented unipolar world, the Empire has assumed the role of world police whose aim is not to apprehend and bring the guilty to justice but to kill. As Chris Hedges, in his latest book The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress that explores the problems of a crumbling Empire, writes, “we have become the monsters that we fight." The blood is going to continue to spill.

It was an ideal moment for proponents of torture to resurface trying to redeem themselves by linking enhanced interrogation techniques to assassination of Osama-bin-Laden. This view is however widely discredited not only by some former and current FBI interrogators but also war mongers like John McCain who was himself tortured during Vietnam War. His personal experience only made him see the other side, a common syndrome with people on the right. In fact many in the intelligence community argued that it took so long because torture is counter-productive and hardens people psychologically to not reveal any information or at best to give false information. It was only through conventional psychological techniques of interrogation that led to Osama-bin-Laden. The hawks however never relent; with amazing persistence they propagate their fascist agendas. The result of all this ‘intelligence’ was targeted assassination and not a fair court of trial. Though mainstream America saw killing of Osama-bin-Laden as justice delivered, most of the Muslim and Arab world saw it as another instance of deep atrocity and felt deeply offended when Osama’s body was dumped in the ocean and was called a ‘deep sea burial.’

It has never been credibly proven that al Qaeda carried the 9/11 attacks, neither did al Qaeda ever own responsibility. A year later after 9/11, the FBI even after most intensive investigation had no hard evidence that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan; there was only a ‘belief.’ Noam Chomsky in his article on bin Laden’s death notes that, “What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know eight months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have.” After the killing, Obama in his White House address proudly owned the event and mentioned how al Qaeda was behind 9/11 and justice was duly served. The Master of Deception was again at his rhetorical best, presenting a lie as truth. Obama has embraced Bush's doctrine that nations that harbor terrorists open themselves to invasion and destruction. Following the logic, the U.S. is one of those nations. If bin Laden was a criminal and “inspired attacks of 9/11” as the right wing columnist Thomas Friedman put it in his NYT column, then by that standards Bush and Obama overshadow bin Laden in criminality by huge proportions. Osama-bin-Laden was at best a ‘suspect,’ whereas the former are directly responsible for over a million lives in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Should they be dealt in the same way? Or probably in some way worse, given their magnitude of criminality? Noam Chomsky quotes in his article The Nuremberg Tribunal for Nazis that “the ‘decider’ who gave the orders to commit the supreme international crime differs only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” If bin Laden radicalized a small part of Muslim population, these two Presidents have radicalized and pushed American population to far right. Even Nazis were brought to the court of law and tried. There was more civility after World War II. Although this just adds to the long list of political assassinations done by US in other countries (e.g. El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina etc.), it needs to be pointed out every time how international law is a puppet in the hands of the Empire.

The goodwill and empathy the US gained after heinous 9/11 attacks was lost in the unjust and monstrous wars it waged in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed civilians many times more than 9/11 and relegated these countries several decades back with destruction of their infrastructure. Now the war has expanded to Pakistan where before killing of Osama-bin-Laden, hundreds of civilians were killed by drone attacks on north-west border of Pakistan on mere suspicion. The Pakistani government as revealed by WikiLeaks remained fully complicit and allowed the US to infringe its sovereignty and operate and invade its lands. The ruling political class in Pakistan however maintained the anti-US and sovereignty rhetoric. The military and intelligence establishment of Pakistan must have known about bin Laden’s whereabouts but they did not let Americans know of it. They play their own double game and cherry pick people to protect who can serve their interest. Anti-American sentiments already run quite high in Pakistan especially after loss of civilian lives in continuous drone attacks and such incidents are only going to exacerbate the already explosive situation. But that is hardly of concern. As far as the corrupt governments and brutal dictators serve the US interest they are fine and are not interfered with dealing with their own population. It is only when the situation gets out of hand that the democracy rhetoric is parroted. Egypt is the most recent example, where the US supported Hosni Mubarak till the very end until things got out of hand. In Afghanistan after supporting a very corrupt Karzai, the US is now in talks with Taliban leaders. People and their will are obviously never on the agenda.

Al Qaeda has already been a spent force. Even according to CIA there were not more than hundred al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Still Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan and deployed more than hundred thousand troops and expanded the war. He wanted to wear the crown of a War president; that shows how tough he is! Targeted assassination has become the bottom line of Obama’s war policies. Extremely unpopular night raids by the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan have killed hundreds of innocent civilians. The assassinations, killings and occupation are only going to radicalize more of Muslim population and increase the cycle of violence. Obama has scaled Bush’s policies to new heights. He has donned the role of the accuser, judge, jury, and executioner all at the same time without any due process. Cornel West, an African American University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University and moral philosopher who campaigned for Obama but now nurses the betrayal, bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.” The cultural degradation has touched new lows.

Even if Osama-bin-Laden was captured and brought to trial, there was hardly any chance that he would have been allowed to live, evidence or no evidence. Saddam Hussein, the favored dictator of Iraq when turned rogue was captured and punished with death penalty. The ICC (International Criminal Court) is a partisan court run mainly on the diktats of the Empire. The international laws are again for weak and disfavored rulers and dictators. The ICC recently issued an arrest warrant for Gaddaffi and two others in Libya but they do not possibly have balls to issue such a warrant for Bush or Obama who are much bigger and worse war criminals. The hypocrisy is nauseating. Diplomacy is just a euphemism for bullying that goes on in international politics. Bullies are tyrants only to the weak and so weak nations suffer at the hands of the powerful nations. The reflections of the pattern can be seen locally, e.g. Russia vs Chechnya, India dealing with Maoists, Pakistan dealing with Baluchistan etc. Only popular revolutions everywhere can save us from this oligarchic-corporate-imperial-military juggernaut.