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June 10, 2006

The Meaning of One Man's Death

Symbols are important in politics. They convey meaning and context to the seeming chaos and fog of daily events. But in the end, what does it all mean? And says who? And, more importantly, why do they say it?

The USG's Bush administration anti-terror bureaucracy is giving itself high-fives and passing out cigars all around over its "victory" in killing the Islamo-fascist thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late "Prince of al-Qaeda". Well, terrific guys! Now what? Like the dog that chases cars, what happens when, by some lucky happenstance, you actually catch one? Or kill one as the case is here? That the War on Terror is closer to and end? Oh no it isn’t.

Why do I say this? Al-Zarqawi was a sociopathtic thug who used religion to fulfill and justify his evil impulses. In another place or time he would have become an unknown serial killer, or perhaps have become a professional torturer for one of the tyrannies that pass for governments in the Middle East. He was what he was. His death saddens very few, and gratifies many. However the strategy of militant Islamism isn't put off or deterred one bit by his demise folks.

"Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Ayman Zawahiri and their revolutionary supporters", says an article in The Asian Times, "believe that international communism's collapse is directly attributable to the mujahideen's political and military pressure. It hardly matters whether this reading is correct (though, as we have noted, it seems unlikely that the Soviet collapse is single-sourced). The reason for the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Soviet Union's subsequent collapse is clear: a major Western power imploded as the result of a defeat at the hands of militant Islam. For al-Qaeda, the differences between the USSR and its American and European antagonists are marginal - Marxism is a uniquely Western worldview, rooted in the views of a German philosopher writing in a London library. The lessons derived from the Soviet collapse are, therefore, applicable to the United States."

In other words, this death changes nada.

Speaking three years before September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden laid out al-Qaeda's strategy, saying that just as the Soviets were defeated as a result of their failed war in Afghanistan, so now the United States would be defeated in the same way. But bin Laden implied that his would not be a military victory; rather, he said that the United States would turn in on itself from within, just as the Soviets had: "What is true is that God granted the chance of jihad in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia, and we are assured that we can wage jihad against the enemies of Islam, in particular against the greater external enemy - the Crusader-Jewish alliance."

Does that sound to you like one man's death is going change anything?

As Charles DeGaulle noted the graveyards are full of "indispensable men, and yet events continue". Go figger, eh?

Posted by Ali Massoud at June 10, 2006 12:02 PM

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