Dave Stockton
Dave Stockton examines the politics of Osama Bin Laden and his relationship to the imperialists in Washington
After nearly ten years of the “War on Terrorism,” US President Barrack Obama has announced the successful assassination of Osama Bin Laden by US military and CIA forces. The hundreds who gathered outside the White House, at Ground Zero in New York City, and in others, with crowds bellowing chants of “USA-USA-USA” and singing the national anthem in triumph, indicate that Bin Laden has been not only the most feared but also the most hated enemy of the USA in the post-Cold War world. 9/11, with over 3,000 civilian deaths, was, after all, the most lethal attack on mainland US soil since the British-American “War of 1812.” Yet, the now bellicose relationship between Bin Laden and the USA was not always so.
Amidst the rejoicings, it will doubtless be forgotten that Bin Laden was a US creation – a Frankenstein monster that turned on his masters. He was a product of another of the US‘s savage “wars of peace,” which have been continuous since the Second World War. This was launched by President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and taken on and given a name by President Ronald Reagan: the war on the “Evil Empire” – the Soviet Union.
Having lured the senile Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev into a foolish coup (against a pro-Soviet regime) and subsequent occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA worked up a Jihad in Afghanistan and across the Muslim world in which Bin Laden was a prime asset of the CIA for a decade of the reactionary Vendée in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s. As many as 40,000 “foreign fighters” took part in this fake national-liberation struggle. As the eldest son and heir of a Saudi millionaire, he raised 200- 300 million dollars a year for it.
Bin Laden was co-responsible with his US backers for the ultra-brutal warlord regime that supplanted the collapsed Stalinist government and years before the Taliban put Afghanistan’s women into the burka.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US dropped unceremoniously its Jihadi tools and, indeed, lost interest in the region. The next US war, the Gulf War of 1990-91, incensed and made a mortal enemy of Bin Laden, not because he sympathised with the regime of Saddam Hussein, but because it involved the creation of US bases in Saudi Arabia: the site of the holy places of Islam.
Across the Arab/Muslim world too the results of the Afghan war were uniformly reactionary. The returning Jihadis rallied existing Islamist groups and won them to a policy of mass terrorism aimed against the regimes they now saw as puppets of the Americans but also against Leftists, nationalists, religious minorities, Shia, and Christian communities.
In May 1996, the group World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders (WIFJAJC) was initiated by ex-Afghans and Osama bin Laden and later reshaped as Al-Qaeda. It was as commentators have pointed out not so much a global Islamist orgainisation directed by Bin Laden as it was a sort of franchise which local groups could take up.
The attacks it carried out were certainly bloody and reactionary; a short list shows this: precursors to the 9/11 attacks were the Luxor Massacre of November 1997 (63 killed) and the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 223 people were killed.
Then came September 11 and the attacks in New York City and Washington DC where around 3,000 innocent civilians perished. The League for the Fifth International stated at the time that we “condemned the indiscriminate mass terrorism of the attack on the World Trade Centre and the killing of the passengers of civilian airliners. This is not the way to struggle against imperialism.” (September 2001)
Despite the immediate attack on Afghanistan – justified as rooting out Al-Qaeda – the number of major terrorist attacks carried out by its affiliates has continued.
These included:
– in 2002 the Bali bombings in Indonesia (202 killed)
– in 2003 the Casablanca bombings in Morocco (33 killed)
– in 2003 the Istanbul bombings in Turkey (57 killed)
– in 2004 the Madrid train bombings in Spain (191 killed)
– in 2005 London bombings (52 killed)
– in 2006 Mumbai train bombings in India (209 killed)-
– in 2007 Algiers bombings (23 killed)
– in 2007 Karachi Pakistan, bombing of Benazir Bhutto’s motorcade (139 killed)
– in 2008 the Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing in Pakistan (54 killed)
– in 2008 the Mumbai hotel attacks in India (164 killed)
– in 2011 the Domodedovo International Airport bombing in Russia (37 killed)
None of these horrific atrocities are justified or constitute any real struggle against imperialism. To these must be added the collateral damage the Al-Qaeda franchise has caused in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, where they have corrupted and divided real resistance to imperialism.
But can Barack Obama and his NATO allies act as policeman – judge, jury, and executioner against Bin laden and his agents? Far from it. If these criminals have killed thousands – maybe tens of thousands – Bush, Blair, Obama, and Cameron are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands – even millions – in the course of the War on Terror. They are terrorists on a scale that puts Bin Laden to shame. Their wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Somalia approach the levels of genocide.
A 2002 analysis by The Guardian estimated that as many as 20,000 Afghans died in 2001 as an indirect result of the initial US air strikes and ground invasion. According to the UN Population Division as of mid-December 2009 it is estimated that in occupied Afghanistan violent deaths total 1.1 million.
A secret US government tally puts the Iraqi (civilian) death toll from 2003 to 2010 at over 100,000.
It is obvious that war criminals of this sort are not entitled to sit in judgement over the likes of Osama Bin Laden.