Amid the jingoistic, hyper-nationalist response to the killing of Osama Bin Laden ("America, Fuck Yeah!") is the willfully ignored (by the media and by most Americans, left and right, including the good liberals of dailykos) historical genesis of the man who is, as one diary has called him, "the face of evil" in the world today.
Let me say from the outset that as an Arab immigrant to the United States, I've always observed things from the outside looking in and have never felt one iota of loyalty to the American state, nor to any state. I don't feel that I have more in common with you, my fellow American, than I do with an Egyptian or a Spaniard. Does that make me "anti-American"? Some might think so. But beyond the fact that I simply don't understand the orgy of flag waving celebration about killing someone (I'm more used to the US media informing us of how sick Arab culture is because those barbaric Arabs/Muslims are the ones who celebrate death), these celebratory reactions, manifested in discourses of American righteousness and exceptionalism, are spotlighting once again the typical American historical amnesia about precisely who Osama bin Laden was and how before he was the metaphysical "face of evil" he was part of an American cold war strategy to fight the Soviets. Yes, he was our friend before he was our enemy, as has been the case with countless dictators around the world.
It might make a difference to some to know that I was in New York on 9/11, I experienced it, was horrified by it, and know people who lost loved ones on that day.
The point of reminding you of all of this is to make very clear that killing Osama bin Laden has more to do with a typical American pattern of creating the very foreign devils that we must later destroy than with exterminating some ahistorical essence of evil in the world related to a cultural quality of "Islam" and its inability to reconcile with the modern world. The "Osama is pure evil" way of explaining Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden has everything to do with the inability to understand (or perhaps the willful intent to ignore) the very specific historical circumstances of their creation.
Let's talk about that for a moment: Did you know, for example, that the anti-Soviet Islamist "jihad" of the 1980s and 1990s was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA? As Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, writes,
"In fiscal year 1987 alone...clandestine U.S. military aid to the mujahideen amounted to 660 million dollars--more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua."
The CIA was key to producing the very kind of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia that it now claims to abhor as the manifestation of pure, anti-American evil. How and why did this happen? In attempting to combat both the Soviet Union and the forces of the Shiite Iranian Revolution, the Reagan administration hoped to unite a billion Sunni Muslims in a holy war against the godless Soviet Union, which would also have the effect of containing the Iranian Shiite revolution as a minority religious affair, Shiites being a minority in the Islamic world.
In 1986, the US provided the Mujahideen with advisors and U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The CIA would seek to recruit Muslims from around the world to train in Pakistan and fight with the Afghan mujahideen.
As Mamdani writes:
The Islamic world had not seen an armed jihad for centuries. Now the CIA was determined to create one, to put a version of tradition at the service of politics. Thus was the tradition of jihad—of a just war with a religious sanction, nonexistent in the last 400 years—revived with U.S. help in the 1980s. In a 1990 radio interview, Eqbal Ahmad explained how "CIA agents started going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight." Pervez Hoodbhoy recalled, "With Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq as America's foremost ally, the CIA advertised, and openly recruited, Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria, Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funneled support to the Mujahidin, and Ronald Reagan feted them on the lawn of the White House, lavishing praise on "brave freedom fighters challenging the Evil Empire. [2001] This is the context in which a U.S./Saudi/Pakistani alliance was forged, and in which religious madrasahs were turned into political schools for training cadres.
It is this context that Osama bin Laden helped build the Khost tunnel complex, a complex the CIA funded as "a major arms depot, as a training facility, and as a medical center for the mujahideen. It is also the context in which bin Laden set up, in 1989, al-Qaeda, or military base, as a service center for Arab Afghans and their families."
Osama bin Laden was an evil doer, you say, and no matter the past, his actions on 9/11 made him an enemy of the United States. But unfortunately, history cannot be ignored or swept under the rug because it is unpleasant or does not fit the nationalist narrative the government wants you to believe. The facts are this: the absence of any kind of historical reckoning of how the US has arrived at this point in history, after a decade of war, after hundreds of thousands of deaths (Americans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, and Afghans), and instead this ahistorical celebration of the killing of a very very bad man, ensures that the US will continue to repeat, over and over again, the disastrous foreign policies of the past. Foreign policies, I might add, that have killed far more civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan than in the United States. We will continue to wage wars in the Islamic world, and the majority of Americans will see it not as a consequence of our imperial foreign policy or of calculating, cynical choices being made by our government, but as a battle of good vs. evil. But that is the unpleasant business of empire. And so it goes...
If you're interested in reading this history, Mamdani's article, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim," can be found here:
http://legacy.lclark.edu/...