In the new video, "Blackbeard" says the US is losing in Iraq. He speaks fondly of the Democrats and Noam Chomsky. If you ask me, the people "bin Laden" really loves are Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, and Bush Jr. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the feeling is mutual, that the Bushes or Cheney are fond of "bin Laden." But the bearded boogeyman sure seems to want to help the American Far Right. This is at least the third time he and/or al Qaeda has emerged like an evil genie from a magic lantern just in time to restore citizen support for the neoconservative agenda.
For many Middle Easterners, including any admirers al Qaeda still has in the Muslim world, "bin Laden" is stating the obvious when he criticizes American policy in the region. But for Americans, this is Reverse Psychology 101. The "world’s most wanted man" is planting a big fat kiss of death—guilt by association—on Bush and Cheney’s opponents and on their opponents’ ideas. I’m reminded, for some reason, of Jeff Gannon, that fake White House reporter who lobbed softball questions to Bush.
Whether the guy in the video is Osama bin Laden or just an actor in a fake beard, we Americans are expected to fall for it and cough up the cash.
How long have we been paying "protection money"?
Years ago, during the Cold War, my mother used to say that every time the military budget came up for a vote, "communists" were found hiding under every bed. Jonathan Tucker, writing on the history of chemical warfare, shows how the US chemical weapons program fought for its budget requests by exaggerating the Soviet chemical threat. In those days, we were buying "protection" from the "communists."
Now I blush to think I fell for the fuss about Nikita Krushchev’s words, "we will bury you." He was just stating a basic tenet of communist ideology, that history will inevitably replace capitalism with communism. Looking back, I feel silly also about having been so afraid the Russians were going to nuke us, and especially about swallowing the lie that they hated us just because we believed in God.
And while we schoolkids were practicing filing down to the basement—or hiding under our desks—in air raid drills, our country built the capacity to destroy the world many times over with nuclear weapons, a capacity we still cling to in defiance of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
"Protection" from what: a terrorist attack or a stock market crash?
It’s no secret that our national economy and the economies of many local American communities have long been dependent on military contractors. Since 9-11, new anti-terrorism and security industries have been growing rapidly in both the US and Israel. By investing in a 401k or a pension fund that buys stocks in military and security contractors, increasing numbers of people have an economic stake in the continuation of the so-called War on Terror.
Perhaps I’m a penny war profiteer myself; I haven’t actually checked to see how my pension fund is managing to stay ahead of inflation. But let’s face it: one of the fears that keeps many Americans cowering is the fear that the value of our stocks and of our dollar would plummet if anything upset the status quo. We suspect that America’s continued prosperity depends on enormous military spending and on the favorable overseas investment climate that can only be maintained through a little arm-twisting when necessary by the "world’s sole superpower."
Are some of us paying protection money to the war machine so that we don’t lose our life savings, our house, our car? The American Way of Life seems to need a lot of protection. It’s so much easier on the conscience to say we need all these bombs because we’re scared of big bad bin Laden.
Will history forgive our failure because we were "scared"?
Some day, will Americans feel silly looking back at how we were manipulated by images of a black-bearded fanatic to the point where we put the next generation into debt buying sinister weapons and useless "security systems" in the name of "protection"?
Will we ever be embarrassed that we were jerked around—to the point of seriously discussing nuking a nation of 70 million peace-loving people—by the latest "we will bury you" hoax, a persistent mistranslation of a comment made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
I guess people who are paying protection money don’t ask questions. They don’t seem to look at maps either. How the heck can one place the never-say-die "missile defense shield" in Poland (!) and expect it to protect Europe from missiles fired from Iran? (Not that Iran has such missiles or intentions to attack Europe.) Talk about bending it like Beckham.
Enough! It’s time to correct our course.
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