I feel no relief at the assassination of Osama bin Laden. I thought I would -- his leading role in the attack on the twin towers on 9/11 nearly killed my wife who was attending a conference in the South Tower. Instead I feel more like Robert Browning’s tortured anti-hero version of the legendary Roland who, after navigating paths of horror to fulfill his quest for the “dark tower”found only ghosts and phantoms, and had only strength to lift his slughorn and blow “Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
Three quarter of a million dead in Iraq with a US military dependent government no less corrupt than Saddam Hussein’s.
On the same weekend OBL is killed, British and Italian planes kill Muammar Gadaffi’s son and three grandchildren. Supposedly in support of a democratic rebellion, the acts engender furious Libyan crowds storming Italian and British missions.
An estimated 50,000 Afghans, mostly civilians, have been killed in the Afghan war. Meanwhile another of General Petraeus’s famous multi-million dollar counter-insurgency construction projects is exposed to have dumped most of the money on “contractors”who were really Taliban insurgents.
The middle east wars have aggravated, not ameliorated, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Prospects for peace are getting worse, not better.
Democratic uprisings are spreading throughout the middle east. Peoples are exhausted at the dictatorships, monarchies, oil despots, ex-cold war thugs and other criminal elements who have thrived on corrupt relations with the US military and the oil interests they have focused on ‘protecting’ and turned the entire region into a hellish cauldron of instability and war and religious fanaticism.
Its time, Mr President, to declare victory and make godspeed homeward!!! Whatever hopes for peace and security there may be in the post-Osama mid-east world, the absence of the US military will hasten their progress and resolution. You have kept your promise to bring bin Laden to justice. Now keep your promise to leave Iraq AND Afghanistan ON SCHEDULE.
What goes around, comes around. We need no more imperialistic karma to come back and kill US. Desist forever from the quest for the “dark tower”of US empire and domination. Do not rest your presidency on blowing a futile horn at a landscape of death.
Osama bin Ladin is dead. Obama – come home
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good points John. It is also time to acknowledge the role of U.S. cold warriors in the events that led to the creation of Al Qaida in their war against Afghanistan in the 1980s and the Bush administration's squandering of global support by its invasion of Iraq in 2003. Not to mention the wealth that the Saudi bin Laden family gained through the Bush policies and the special treatment they received in leaving the U.S. in 2001 while many Muslim Americans of working class faced abuse and even imprisonment because of guilt by association.
Posted by norman markowitz, 05/02/2011 1:19pm (14 years ago)
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