[Originally posted 1 May 2011]
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aving faded into irrelevance, locked in the dustbin of our
memories, Osama Bin Laden today was executed by CIA operatives at a mansion
near Islamabad, Pakistan, in which country he has been a welcome guest for some
years. In real life a wealthy playboy heir to a construction fortune, Osama
liked to dress-up as a super-heroic Qur’an scholar and defender of the faith
with a secret identity that fooled no one. Puffed-up by his triumph in a
walk-on rôle in the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s he returned to Saudi Arabia
the towering hero of his fantasies, though unheard of outside of the tiny
Arabian kingdom.
When Saddam Hussein sent troops to invade Kuwait, potentially
threatening the kingdom, Osama made a comic-opera proposal to personally defend
the borders with his troop of merry men who would fight the invaders with
faith—and was stung when the king rejected him in favor of the most powerful
military force in the world. What did the United States have that he and his
little gang of misfits didn’t, he wondered. He made such a nuisance of himself
that he was invited to leave the kingdom in no uncertain terms, and he stomped
off in a huff to nurse his hurt feelings in Sudan, where, to add injury to
insult, his family cut off his multi-million-dollar allowance.
Soon even the Sudanese grew tired of him, and he found it
expedient to return to the scene of his fancied triumphs in Afghanistan. From
there he helped finance a series of failed attempts to stir up trouble in
Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere. Still rankling over his rejection by the Arabian
authorities, he blamed the United States for all his problems. Calling himself
the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders he announced his
intention of killing Americans throughout the world. The 1998 attack on US
embassies in Africa, however, resulted mainly in the deaths of Africans, and
his inept plot to attack millennium celebrations in the United States was
easily foiled.
Fortunately for him, however, this blundering boob met his
match when George W. Bush entered the White House through an unlocked back
door. Donning the mantle of the U. S. President, Bush declared Bin Laden and
his friends to be no threat to the country, and called off the dogs. The
result: nineteen conspirators, armed with box-cutters, hijacked four airliners
and flew three of them into various buildings. (The fourth was easily taken
down by the passengers, who unfortunately lost their lives in consequence.) The
result was history, of a sort. Several thousand people died in the mayhem, but
nothing of any military consequence was achieved, and this pipsqueak (and the
world) now had an enraged idiot colossus on his hands.
Like a blind giant the United States started flailing about.
An early blow took out one of Osama’s most hated opponents, Saddam Hussein, no
doubt to his delight, but the destruction of his hosts in Afghanistan forced
him to relocate abruptly. His network in ruins, he was reduced to crouching in
the rubble of his dreams and issuing occasional rambling diatribes that the
media dutifully carried, and operatives of the world’s intelligence services
pored over for clues to his whereabouts. Fortunately friends in neighboring
Pakistan took him in, and looked after him—until United States operatives under
Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, stormed his hideout and executed him. It was an
inglorious end to a futile and wasted life. Nobody is likely to miss him
much—certainly not the Indonesians, Egyptians, Kenyans, and others whose
family-members he had murdered to fuel his sadistic fantasies. The team that
executed him dragged back his corpse as a ghastly souvenir. I suppose it will
be returned to his family for burial or something equally civilized. Personally
I hope they have his skull hollowed out for use as a visitor’s ashtray at the
White House.
In the meantime, his spirit lingers on. News comes of an
explosion in Afghanistan that killed four people, in addition to the human
bomb. Somebody had strapped explosives to a twelve-year-old and sent him to his
death. For politics.
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