The death of Osama bin Laden is a Pyrrhic victory for the West.

It's a victory because bin Laden's existence was a reminder of the impotence of the US and all its allies.

It was evidence that the superpower could be struck with impunity. For all its technology and firepower, the US and its satellite states, including Australia, proved unable to strike back against the architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

While he was alive, he was a standing taunt to Western power and a source of encouragement and satisfaction to his fans and followers.

And it's Pyrrhic because bin Laden's provocation to the US was immensely more successful than the terrorist had hoped. He said as much, and he was right.

Terrorism is a tool of the weak against the strong. Its potency is not in the harm it inflicts but in the reaction it provokes.

Terrorism is most damaging when it prods the strong into using its own strength against itself.

That is precisely what bin Laden achieved. Not in the initial US reaction of invading Afghanistan, which was a rational and globally-supported effort to deny terrorism a safe haven and to repair a failed state.

It was the US decision to invade Iraq, using September 11 and bin Laden as pretext, and supported by Britain and Australia, that proved so destructive.

from Chris Floyd...

The excuse for the War on Terror is gone; will the War on Terror now come to an end? The bipartisan high and mighty rushed to insist that it most certainly will not. Obama, Bush, Kerry, McCain, Boehner, Schumer -- all the great and good were quick to say that "the fight is not over," the "threat is still there" -- the profitable wars and fearmongering will go on. And on. And on.

(Besides, who needs bin Laden when we've got Gadafy back as the demon du jour? In any case, Great Satans are always thick on the ground when the War Machine needs greasing.)

I suppose there is a chance, however -- a chance -- that the elimination of this emblem might finally stir a few more people to oppose, or at least begin to question, the continuation of the wars that were supposedly launched in response to 9/11. Perhaps a few more people will look around and say, "Why is our nation going bankrupt fighting all these wars? Didn't they kill ole bin Laden already? Wasn't that what it was all about?"

Of course, that never was "what it is was all about." But as the elites push forward with their wars, perhaps we'll see a bit more pushback. A wan hope, perhaps -- or rather, certainly. By and large, the American people seem to have accepted permanent war as a natural state, just the way things are and will always be. But perhaps the removal of this all-obscuring symbol from the public consciousness will let a few more chinks of light into a few more minds.

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President Obama acknowledged that the post-9/11 unity of the people of the United States "has at times frayed." But he didn't mention that that unity had actually collapsed completely within 24 hours of the horrifying attacks on the twin towers. September 11, 2001 didn't "change the world;" the world was changed on September 12, when George W. Bush announced his intention to take the world to war in response. That was the moment that the actual events of 9/11, a crime against humanity that killed nearly 3,000 people, were left behind and the "global war on terror" began. That GWOT war has brought years of war, devastation and destruction to hundreds of thousands around the world, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond.

There was an unprecedented surge of unity, of human solidarity, in response to the crime of 9/11. In the United States much of that response immediately took on a jingoistic and xenophobic frame (some of which showed up again last night in the aggressive chants of "USA, USA!!" from flag-waving, cheering crowds outside the White House following President Obama's speech). Some of it was overtly militaristic, racist and Islamophobic. But some really did reflect a level of human unity unexpected and rare in U.S. history. Even internationally, solidarity with the U.S. people for a brief moment replaced the well-deserved global anger at U.S. arrogance, wars, and drive towards empire. In France, headlines proclaimed "nous sommes tous Américaines maintenant." We are all Americans now.

But that human solidarity was short-lived. It was destroyed by the illegal wars that shaped the U.S. response to the 9/11 crime. Those wars quickly created numbers of victims far surpassing the 3,000 killed on September 11. The lives of millions more around the world were transformed in the face of U.S. aggression - in Pakistan alone, where a U.S. military team assassinated bin Laden, thousands of people have been killed and maimed by U.S. drone strikes and the suicide bombs that are part of the continuing legacy of the U.S. war.

These wars have brought too much death and destruction. Too many people have died and too many children have been orphaned for the United States to claim, as President Obama's triumphantly did, that "justice has been done" because one man, however symbolically important, has been killed. However one calculates when and how "this fight" actually began, the U.S. government chose how to respond to 9/11. And that response, from the beginning, was one of war and vengeance - not of justice.

The president's speech last night could have aimed to put an end to the triumphalism of the "global war on terror" that George W. Bush began and Barack Obama claimed as his own. It could have announced a new U.S. foreign policy based on justice, equality, and respect for other nations. But it did not. It declared instead that the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and beyond will continue.

In that reaffirmation of war, President Obama reasserted the American exceptionalism that has been a hallmark of his recent speeches, claiming that "America can do whatever we set our mind to." He equated the U.S. ability and willingness to continue waging ferocious wars, with earlier accomplishments of the U.S. - including, without any trace of irony, the "struggle for equality for all our citizens." In President Obama's iteration, the Global War on Terror apparently equals the anti-slavery and civil rights movements.

Justice or Vengeance?

The United States' most vilified terrorist foe has been dead only a week but China is already haunted by the phantom of the next big US enemy. Almost simultaneously with the spread of the news of Osama bin Laden's death in a covert US operation in Pakistan, Chinese analysts had begun the guessing game of where Washington will focus its attention next.

"Why didn't they catch him alive?" speculated military affairs analyst Guo Xuan. "Because he was no longer needed as an excuse for Washington to take the anti-terror war outside of the US borders. It is because of bin Laden that the US were allowed to increase their strategic presence in many places around the world as never before. But Libya and NATO's attack there have changed the game. They (the US) no longer need bin Laden to assert their authority."

Even before bin Laden's death, Beijing had expressed concern that the US strategists are diverting their attention from the war on terror to containing the rise of China and other emerging economies.

A long article on Libya stalemate published by the editor of Contemporary International Relations magazine, Lin Limin, argued that the US has been unwilling to take the lead role in the Libya conflict because it has "finally woken up to the fact that its main reason to worry are the emerging countries.

"If the US position on Libya is not only a tactical stance but a strategic one and they have really come to understand that they should not waste military power and energy in numerous directions 'spreading democracy' all over the world but should begin focusing their attention on the rise of emerging countries, then we do have a reason to worry," Lin argued.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/05/201156132839140238.html

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So what took al-Qaeda so long to replace Osama bin Laden? It's been over six weeks since a U.S. Navy SEAL team killed the terrorist chief, and only now has al-Qaeda decided on his successor — Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, an acerbic Egyptian physician who was bin Laden's longtime deputy.

Even for the likes of al-Qaeda, an organization not known for its warm and fuzzy side, al-Zawahiri has a reputation for obnoxiousness. One ex-militant describes al-Zawahiri, 60, as "sharp-tongued" and "arrogant." His scraggly beard, prayer callous on his forehead and thick glasses make him look more like an unpleasant and pious schoolmaster than a terrorist mastermind. Nevertheless, al-Zawahiri remains a force to be reckoned with. The Egyptian fully intends to continue waging bin Laden's war against the U.S. and its allies, his hatred sharpened by the fact that his wife and two children were killed by a U.S. air strike in October 2001 while fleeing across Afghanistan.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2078207,00.html#ixzz1PXTP9pSH

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As its feared and fearsome leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi personifies the brutality, determination and ambition of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Not since Osama bin Laden has a leader been held in such reverence among Sunni fighters, scored such stunning and shocking victories, and threatened so much of the established order.

But unlike Bin Laden, whose vast wealth aided his elevation to the "sheikh", Baghdadi has literally fought his way from ordinary beginnings in northern Iraq to lead what is perhaps the Middle East’s most feared irregular armed force.

So emboldened by his success on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, Baghdadi has challenged the very leadership of al-Qaeda, denouncing them publicly as deviating from the cause and stating he is the true heir to Bin Laden's legacy.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/06/fierce-ambition-isil-baghdadi-2014612142242188464.html

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     by Philip Giraldi

Does anyone really think that Iran threatens the United States? It’s only plausible if you can be convinced by a congenital liar and war criminal like Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or by a buffoon like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. My head was still throbbing recently due to the damage done while watching Netanyahu’s 56 standing ovations from a bought and paid for Congress when I came across among my old books a volume bearing a title that summed up what I have been thinking about. It was called “In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story” and was written by a former Agency colleague named John Stockwell back in 1978.

Stockwell spent part of his high school years with his Presbyterian missionary father in the Belgian Congo. He then graduated from the University of Texas followed by three years in the United States Marine Corps. He joined the CIA in 1964 and earned respect as an experienced “Africa Hand,” as the expression was commonly used, during his twelve years in the Agency’s Operations Deputy Directorate that ended when he resigned in 1976. Stockwell served as a case officer through three wars: the Congo Crisis, as chief of the Agency “task force” in the Angolan War of Independence, and Vietnam. Six of Stockwell’s years were in Africa, as Chief of Base in Katanga, then Chief of Station in Bujumbura, Burundi in 1970, before being transferred to Vietnam to oversee intelligence operations in Tay Ninh province where he received the CIA Intelligence Medal of Merit for keeping his post operating until just before the fall of Saigon to the communists in 1975.

In his resignation letter, Stockwell cited deep concerns over the methods and results of CIA paramilitary operations in Third World countries and he subsequently testified to that effect before Congressional committees. Two years later, he wrote In Search of Enemies, about that experience and its broader implications. He claimed that the CIA was damaging national security, and that its “secret wars” provided no benefit for the United States. The CIA, he stated, had singled out the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) to be an enemy in Angola despite the fact that the MPLA wanted good relations with the United States and had not threatened the US in any way. In 1978 he appeared on the American television program 60 Minutes to discuss his book, inter alia claiming that CIA Director William Colby and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had systematically lied to Congress and the public about the CIA’s operations in Africa and elsewhere.

Stockwell played a major role in a war that America later chose to forget. It was a conflict full of lessons about the tyranny of bureaucracy run amok and the force of habit driving a bloody process that had no end game. Indeed, the top secret presidential finding authorizing the covert war in Angola explicitly directed the CIA to avoid victory — the goal was instead “to hemorrhage Russian coffers and bleed Angolan bodies, all to keep Russia ‘on its toes’” after the US abandonment of Vietnam the year before. Though no American troops were on the ground in Angola, only “advisors,” many millions of dollars were spent, many thousands died, and many lies were told to the American people in waging a war without any relationship to American vital interests and without hope of victory. In many ways it was makes one think of the tragedies involving US foreign and national security policies that are playing out today. If it sounds a lot like the aftermath of the disengagement from Afghanistan more recently, it should. One needs an enemy to justify a bloated defense establishment and if there is no enemy available one will be invented just as Senator Lindsey Graham has already introduced Senate Bill SJ106, which authorizes in advance war with Iran even if Iran does nothing to provoke it. It is a declaration of war in advance against an “enemy” that will be convenient when needed!

Graham is at the tail end of a process of American the warmongering that has been developing ever since the Second World War and which has intensified over the past thirty years. America’s real power and relevance as measured by its economy and leadership has declined, often due to bad decisions made by the country’s government that have turned competitors into truly motivated adversaries. Once upon a time developing countries like China have pursued successful export driven programs. China’s has now made it the largest economy in the world, but the US increasingly sees Beijing’s success as a “threat,” creating a crisis situation where one does not really exist. The US, trying to mask its decline and increase its relevance by boosting its military spending on costly obsolete weapon systems like aircraft carriers, has only made the matter worse by running up huge unsustainable deficits that will before too long come home to roost!

And once you have all that expensive military hardware sitting around, it behooves one to use it, tempting weak politicians to adopt aggressive postures in parts of the world where the US had no real interests to support. Washington’s 900 military bases around the world serve no conceivable defense purposes but the bullying-effect produced by their presence elicits an inevitable reaction with developing and even some advanced countries figuring out that dollar dominance is at the heart of the problem. These countries have begun to join together to resist “Yankee imperialism” and negotiate agreements to create new economic and political alignments like BRICS, which will only serve to accelerate American decline.

So what is the solution perceived by Democrat and Republican leaders alike? More sanctions are the easy route as long as the US is able to manage much of world trade through the dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency. Currently one third of the nations in the world are under US sanctions for one reason or another and the Treasury Department’s sanctions document that lists those affected by name runs to 2669 pages. And there have been many more military interventions, coupled with special operations arranged with NATO and the dwindling group of friendly nations, which in turn drives the other nations into tight embraces with those who no longer are willing to accept what the clueless American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright boasted about: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

American thinking at the top level is clearly driven by what the country’s leadership will sell to the public, namely fear of alleged threats emanating from other countries, currently most particularly from China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela and Iran. It is always good to have an enemy that you can blame everything on but it comes at a price, which is that the “enemies” will figure out what is going on and will band together and cooperate to resist US aggression. That is what we are seeing now with the US on many countries’ own enemies list and opinion polls suggesting how disliked Washington now is!

The sad truth is that it is the United States government that finds it expedient to begin the process of creating enemies for consumption in hopes of justifying non-beneficial alliances and other foreign arrangements and defense alignments that make no sense overseas. Say what one will about Russian President Vladimir Putin, but the moves made by Russian diplomats over the past twenty years were intended to create an accommodation with the west. Key to that improved relationship was Washington’s adherence to the post-Soviet Union break-up commitment to not expand NATO into Eastern Europe, which Moscow saw as a red line. The White House subsequently ignored that agreement almost immediately.

But it was Washington’s overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine that was friendly to Moscow in 2014 that set the stage for a deterioration in the multilateral relationship between Russia and NATO after Putin realized that there was little point in trying to establish an acceptable modus vivendi with the West. As we have learned recently from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Minsk Agreement which would have established a non-aligned Ukraine was all a fraud, with NATO intended to arm and extend membership to Kiev in spite of pledges not to do so. Even as late as April 2022, shortly after Russia intervened in Ukraine to protect the ethnic Russian minority in Donbas and Crimea in February 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled unexpectedly to Ukraine to warn Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky that any peace talks with Moscow would not be acceptable to the US, UK and NATO. It was a demand that Ukraine should be prepared to continue the war.

Likewise with the deliberate poisoning of relations with other potential and actual enemies. One recalls how in 1972 the US and China established a modus vivendi that would allow the two countries to live in peace, or at least in a way that would preclude armed conflict. It was called the “One China” policy and it recognized that an independent Taiwan, surviving under an American military umbrella, was a part of greater China. But, at the same time, China agreed not to try to acquire it by force and the US maintained what has been referred to as “strategic ambiguity” over the issue. Now, however, the United States has made a major issue of possible malevolent Chinese intentions and Beijing is increasingly being seen by both major parties in Washington as the over the horizon enemy. There is considerable talk in Washington about having to “deal with” China and the Chinese leadership is fully aware of what is being mooted. China will now do whatever is necessary to alleviate the threat and will act completely in its own interests, another huge failure of American diplomacy.

So the United States missteps have turned two major military and economic powers – Russia and China – into enemies and those two countries are responded as they see appropriately by creating relationships to strike back if necessary against the US. As Israel is about to launch a regional war with a focus on crippling Iran and Washington has pledged to defend the Jewish state even if it starts the conflict, which it has already done de facto, Russia, in particular, may have already come to the aid of Tehran, reportedly supplying it with sophisticated S-400 air defense systems that are capable of shooting down US and Israeli warplanes. Iran is reciprocating by selling Moscow armed drones in large numbers for use against Ukraine. The inevitable escalation between two nuclear armed major powers and a reckless nuclear armed Israel in the middle begins at that point and the sad thing is that the growing conflict never had to start in the first place if the White House had used its influence to restrain the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza and its assassinations in Lebanon and Iran itself.

In the “enemies ranking” after China and Russia certainly comes Iran itself, largely due to insistence that that must be so by the Israelis, who largely control aspects of foreign policy in Washington. Israel asserts that Iran is a threat to the US as well as to Israel because it is developing a nuclear weapon. This view was most recently reiterated in front of the US Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and it is a complete fabrication. Even Israeli intelligence concedes that Iran has no nuclear weapon program and is far from having such a device. Indeed, the fact is that Iran has never threatened the United States and has no interest in doing so. Israel, which has a secret nuclear arsenal, is more of a threat to the US than is Iran due to its embrace of the “Samson Option” in which it would use its nukes to strike friendly countries under certain circumstances.

So there you have it. Witness the frantic search for new enemies as needed by the lunatics in charge in Washington, even when reality does not support the narrative. That is what the Stockwell book was all about and it was as true in 1964 as it is today. The United States and Europeans claim to be fearful of Russia providing top level weapons systems to Iran to help that country defend itself so it can develop a nuclear weapon, which it has in fact no intention of doing. And the record shows something quite different, i.e. that Iran has been on the receiving end of attacks from both Israelis and Americans as well as assassination of its senior officials including Donald Trump’s killing of Revolutionary Guard commander Qassim Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020. So who are really the bad guys here? I think the answer is clear.

Reprinted from Unz Review.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/americas-search-for-new-enemies/

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