The Devil is Dead

Osama bin Laden's photograph has been splashed across every newspaper front page in the world as the World's No.1 Mad Man. Now he is dead, having evaded the forces of the US and its allies for almost a decade, despite a $25m bounty on his head. Osama bin Laden was a billionaire Islamic fundamentalist, former US ally and protégé. Osama bin Laden went to Pakistan in 1979 as an official of the Saudi intelligence service to finance, organise, and control the anti- Soviet Afghan resistance in collaboration with the CIA. It was here that Osama, who had trained as an engineer and economist with a view to taking part in the family business, acquired his taste for war.

Osama bin Laden’s messages to the world were invariable couched in religious terms but in reality his first and abiding concern relates to political conditions in Saudi Arabia. He fell out with the Saudi royal family in 1991 when they allowed the US to set up military bases on the "holy" soil of Arabia following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. He was driven by a strong desire to replace the present rulers there – possibly with himself though this is never explicitly stated – and with an obsession to end United States presence in the Middle East. Two thirds of all Al Qaeda attacks originate from countries with a US military presence not from for example Sudan or Iran – both strongly Islamic states. He castigated the United States because it supports regimes that he considered corrupt, and because “It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources” They should “Deal with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of subjugation, theft and occupation.” An analysis of bin Laden propaganda video tapes Fawaz Gerges of Columbia University has concluded that bin Laden and Al Qaeda are “religious nationalists” and that “under the thick layer of bin Laden’s rhetoric and Islamic trans-nationalism lies an unconscious Saudi nationalist.”

As an act of war, the bin Laden inspired attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre was somewhat unusual, though not unprecedented, in three respects. First, the method used was non-standard.Standard military practice is to blow things and people up by dropping bombs or firing shells and missiles on them. But flying planes right into the target has been done before. Japanese kamikaze pilots used the technique against US warships in the Pacific during World War Two. Second, al-Qaeda is a non-state actor. Such actors rarely have the capacity to carry through such a complex and costly operation.Therefore al-Qaeda must have had financial backing from wealthy sponsors - Osama bin Laden himself comes from an extremely wealthy family - and the support,or at least complicity, of one or more powerful states ( in exile Osama received frequent visits from relatives, who provided a channel of communication between him and the royal family. An understanding appears to have been reached. Osama would abstain from attacking targets inside Saudi Arabia and in return no action would be taken against his Saudi supporters, who included various members of his own and of other wealthy families (such as Khalid bin Mahfouz, the "banker of terror" and even certain royal princes. And the Saudi authorities did protect these people, refusing to provide US intelligence agencies with any information that might compromise them) . In general, arranging wars is a pastime for members of the capitalist class, though they get hirelings to do the dirty work for them. Working people don't command the necessary resources. Finally, it is a little unusual for the US to be on the receiving end of a military assault from abroad. For a comparable attack on the continental United States, you have to go back to 1814, when the British army entered Washington and burned down the White House.

But in other ways the attack was not unusual in the least. As an atrocity it was par for the course. The death toll about 3,000. Atrocities on a similar or larger scale are committed routinely by the US in other countries. To take just one example, 3-4,000 civilians were killed in the invasion of Panama in December 1989. Even if we start the reckoning with September 11, we find that the US was quick to even up the score. According to an independent study, 3,767 Afghan civilians (hardly any of them with a connection to al-Qaeda) had been killed in bombing raids by 6 December, 2001.

A one-sided view of terrorism would suggest that terrorism is perpetrated by small groups in the shadows of society who make strange and uncompromising political or religious demands of the world, demands which “we” - the civilised and satisfied members of society - could not possibly meet. The aim of bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda was nothing to do with a “clash of civilisations”, as some have suggested. Instead, it is merely a tactic to force members of the “host country” (the country they seek to influence by acts of terrorism) to listen to their demands and to pressurise their governments not to do what irks them and to leave them be to set their own standard of life, in the part of the world where they live.Others have also suggested that the West gets only what it has asked for by interfering in other countries: why, so the logic continues, can we not accept the fact that a nation or people are likely to defend “their” country when we are supposed to stand up and defend “ours”? To promote violence in bourgeois society, a society based on perpetual war, is not too difficult for it is a violent society by its nature. Governments, religious authorities, most political parties, businesses and media institutions, all accept the need for violence in society to settle or solve particular problems.

Welcome to capitalism. As long as we have capitalism, that is, competition between capitalists and capitalist states which leads to terrorism and open military war, we will never be free of violence and terrorism.