Violence begets violence

KIBITZER
Rod Kapunan
5/9-15/2011



Maybe the world cannot compel the US to change its tagging of Osama bin Laden as the world’s number one terrorist.

But how the US Navy Seals carried out their mission instantly changed that perception. Many are beginning to believe the US as more ruthless than the man they killed. Such is the conclusion for if the objective was to get Bin Laden alive and whished him to their notorious prison camp in Guantanamo.

Public perception might have been positive to possibly justify President Bush’s decision to set up of a prison camp for terrorists with security as primordial than the issues of international law, human rights, and jurisdiction.

His own History
Osama bin Laden has made his own history by daring to fight the mightiest state in our modern era. But what he did not know, the state has already metamorphosed to one of a criminal state capable of unleashing an incomparable degree of ruthlessness and brutality to countries it calls rogue states.

The method with which Bin Laden and his motley band of jihadists used to bravely challenge the might of the US was something of a “quixotic war.” It was only their hatred that fired up their adrenalin to fight and gave them the idea to open a new dimension in warfare understood as an “asymmetrical warfare” because it imposes to no limitations and inhibitions to its target.

But even if the US successfully eliminated its most dreaded enemies, the world did not see it that way.

As one would quip, the US has become a criminal state for it now openly flaunts its might to make a travesty of international law by violating the sovereignty of Pakistan and disregarding the basic rules of engagement.


It was Murder
The world was stunned knowing how the special team carried out their mission.

It was murder because Bin Laden was unarmed when he was cornered at the top floor the building. Although he might have attempted to resist, he could have easily been overpowered by the US Navy Seals if their objective was to get him alive.

Unfortunately, even the plan to execute Bin Laden went beyond bounds. The raid resulted in his eldest son being killed and his wife shot.

Perhaps, the only thing that has been altered in that mission was, instead of his head being chopped and placed in an ice box to be brought to the White House for the viewing of US President Bush, as one leading US weekly magazine wrote, they decided instead to throw his body to the Indian Ocean, a final act of scoffing the dead.

Not Unprecedented
No doubt, the dumping his body was an insult not to the dead who knows nothing of how his executioner intended to dispose of his body, but to the believers of Islam who equally adhere to the morals of allowing relatives to give a decent burial to their dead. But it was not unprecedented.

The CIA did that to the body of that Latin American revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara. They chopped off his hands to be presented as evidence that indeed it was Guevara they felled, and buried his partly charred body in the dense forest of Bolivia without a marker so that those who believed in his ideology could not give him their hero- worship.

A CIA Creation
Besides, few people know that Osama bin Laden was a US creation.

The CIA exploited his deep conviction for Islam by urging him to wage a jihadist war in Afghanistan by forming an international brigade.

In Afghanistan Bin Laden was tasked to form an army of mujahidin volunteers made up of fanatical Muslims from all over the world to liberate that country from the Soviet occupation.

Many Filipino Muslims volunteered, and they were recruited under the close supervision of the CIA. They became veterans only to return this time seeking to establish a separate puritanical Islamic state by forming the Abu Sayyaf.

Having outlived their usefulness they were promptly reclassified as terrorists no different from what happened to their recruiter Bin Laden.

Capitalizing on Osama
But what the world is now witnessing is that the US is capitalizing on Bin Laden’s unbridled fascination for violence to inflict a far greater degree of violence.

Maybe the greatest blunder of Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda is not that they dared to fight, but did not know gruesome consequence of the US using its arsenal of cruise missiles to hit targets from far away Somalia, Yemen and Tanzania, and the use of drones loaded with high explosives in Pakistan.

Weeding out terrorists was used to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and as a result killed millions of innocent civilians, while insisting their presence there is needed to strengthen their version of democracy and freedom.

Stone-Age Mentality
For that the US has become more unpopular that its own ally Germany has become cynical of its objective with former Chancellor Helmut Schroeder cautioning Chancellor Angela Merkel from making unnecessary comment on the execution of Bin Laden.

Germany has refused to participate in collectively punishing an entire population by NATO’s bombing of Libya that could push that country back to Stone Age.

The so-called “no-fly zone” become the license of the US and NATO to bomb population centers resulting in death to thousands of innocent civilians, including the son of Muammar Gaddafi and three of his grandchildren, but would never admit their act is terrorism.

As usual, the US is telling the world its decision to bomb Libya is intended to prevent the spread of violence by Gadaffi’s forces short of saying that a criminal state always wants a monopoly of violence.

(rodkap@yahoo.com.ph)