Al Qaeda's Perfect Plan

lewleadbeater.com

notes from the edge

Home

Email Me

Other Essays

Al Qaeda’s Perfect Plan

It would seem that the inevitable is happening. Finally, after a strong goose from Sen. John McCain, the mugwumpish sheep in the media are beginning to use the “V” word relative to the mess in Iraq. Yes, they’re actually floating the idea that we might be in another Vietnam situation. No longer finding it feasible to pander to the patriotic posturing and lies of Bush, Rumsfeld et. al., the press, which Bush doesn’t read, and the TV reports, which Bush doesn’t watch, are beginning to let the truth of the situation filter through to the public.

Despite the fact that the administration has put the kibosh on pictures of Americans coming home in body bags and caskets, newspapers and TV broadcasts are now accurately reporting on the deaths occurring every day in the desert shambles that is Iraq.

Yet, the analogy with Vietnam, is, I think, rather inaccurate. Given the nature of the war-after-the-war in Iraq, the linkage is not so much with Vietnam as it is with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The tactics being used by those opposed to the American occupation of Iraq have been taken directly from the Hamas/Hezbollah war book.

It is not Vietnamese jungle warfare we’re involved in, but rather what we seem to be facing are incessant and unexpected attacks from suicide bombers bent on their own destruction no less than that of their targets. And our response is almost always similar to that of the Israelis: we search for hostile hideouts and bomb them, frequently without remorse for the ancillary deaths we cause.

And this could, as the Mideast crisis has, go on for years. Or at least it will go on as long as reactive rightists, such as Sharon and Bush, are in control of things.

In fact, the deeper we delve into the morass of Iraq, the clearer it becomes that the vision of Al Qaeda went far beyond the events of 9/11. If in fact their goal was the total disruption of American economic and political life and the entanglement of this country in a vast, inextricable web of military miscalculations and loss of American lives, they have succeeded admirably.

As a result of 9/11 and the reactive warmongering that only the far right knows how to concoct, we have knee-jerked ourselves into retaliatory moves that have wrecked our economy, caused our federal deficits to soar uncontrollably, pitted Christianity against Islam, sent our youth to die in misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, made liars of our leaders, fostered hatred against us around the world because of our hegemonic haughtiness, put in jeopardy many of our basic constitutional rights, and, worst of all, forced us to tally the daily deaths of Americans who lost their lives in defense of the biliousness that is Baghdad.

In other words, Al Qaeda has rather brilliantly brought about what the Germans call Die Weltvernichtungsidee, or the negation of the world as we knew it before the attacks of 9/11.

Like Sharon and the insatiable war whores in his Likud Party, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the neocons now controlling our lives gobbled up the bait offered by the relatively weak Islamic fishermen and have, as a result, become ensnared in the nets controlled by the hit-and-run terrorists who now embarrassingly control their every move.

Just as Sharon builds his wall of separation and thus adds to the hostility between Jew and Palestinian, so we are now engaged in bulwark building in Iraq. Yet, despite our attempts to surround all major buildings and some localities with defensive fortifications, and despite Sharon’s attempts at physical and demographic exclusivity, the suicide attacks go on, fed by the reactive hostility that they occasion.

It is an endless cycle of death that is, ironically, the life blood of organizations like Al Qaeda. And to maintain their operation, indeed to augment their operations, they rely on the pinched psyches of leaders like Sharon and Bush to keep the pot boiling.

Add to this the logorrheic antics of run-amok generals, such as William Boykin, and the pot runneth over. Evidently, Lt. Gen. Boykin thinks we’re in the midst of the Crusades again, and the good-guy Christians are fighting the antichrists of Islam. Gen. Boykin also believes that his god, as opposed to the Supreme Court, ensconced Bush in the White House. To date, Bush, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld have not disagreed with the good general, who will remain at his post. With this kind of nitwittery afoot, how can Al Qaeda and its henchmen fail?

Did Al Qaeda have any idea how far reaching the attacks of 9/11 would be? You bet they did. Their plan was perfect, and its perfection was assured as a result of their ability to read the reactive, vindictive and muddled mindset of one man: George W.Bush.

October 29, 2003