October 8, 2007
by Paul Kemp

Osama bin Laden is the best enemy our petrodollars can buy.  He is frugal with the hundreds of millions of dollars we put at his disposal, by way of our oil and heroin  addictions.

He is using our own money to check our aggressive urges toward the Muslim countries.  We pay our good friends, the kings and emirs, for oil and they make charitable contributions to defend their faith...to Al-Qaeda.  So, also, do the opium traffickers in Afghanistan give to support their favorite religious warrior.

Former CIA analyst Robert Baer's book entitled "Sleeping With the Devil" describes in depth the sick relationship of the Saudi royal family's massive donations to Al-Qaeda, which they hope (duplicitously) will protect them from Osama's wrath and channel his attacks toward what he calls "The Far Enemy," the United States.  So far, for most of the time, this strategy has been successful in buying the Saudis time to loot more of Arabia's fantastic wealth.

A key insight to be gained from Baer's book and echoed in Robert Scheuer's "Imperial Hubris," is that Osama bin Laden's key objective is justice for the Muslim people.  He sees himself fighting a defensive jihad or holy war.  Two things stand in the way of achieving that justice: the corrupt kings and military pro-Western puppets of the Muslim countries (the Near Enemies), and the United States and Israel, which use their military and diplomatic power to keep the Near Enemies in power.

Osama has made the strategic choice to expend his resources toward trying to break the support of the U.S. for Israel and the other repressive U.S.-backed regimes of the Middle East first, before tackling the removal of the corrupt apostate rulers that oppress his own people.  This seems a perfectly rational choice, however much we might wish his methods were more Gandhian.

Nevertheless, it seems odd that our U.S. leaders are engaged in a long term war against an enemy we indirectly fund, but there is no attempt to remove the source of Al-Qaeda's funding.  No gas rationing, no urges to conserve, and only a dilettante-ish effort to support development of alternative fuels.

Even with the U.S. and UN occupation of Afghanistan, the production and export of heroin has grown by a factor of twenty, providing much-needed funds for Al-Qaeda's military efforts to defeat the "Crusaders."  Some investigative reporter needs to research how this can be.  Is the CIA up to its old "black budget" funding tricks?  How else is it possible to grow and move 94% of the world's supply of opium out of a country in the age of satellite and other remote surveillance?

Creating the Perfect Enemy

A great novelist couldn't imagine a more perfect nemesis for the American Empire than Osama bin Laden.  The millionaire son of one of George the First's business partners, Osama turns his cut of our oil money into airline tickets and flight training for his henchmen, who then topple our great skyscrapers.  Or so the legend goes.

Later, he comes on TV to mock us.  The impoverished people of Islam are cheering him on.

And the only answer our leaders can think of to address this request for justice is to drop more bombs, send more soldiers to threaten all the people of the Islamic world, whether or not they support Osama bin Laden.  We kill or intimidate those who will not be bought off.  We're driving the survivors into Osama's radical camp.

If the American people could clearly see the reasons for the Al-Qaeda attacks on us around the world, they would see we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by 1)ending our military/economic/political support for Israel and the oppressive regimes of Saudi Arabia, et al., in the Middle East; 2) removing our military occupation of the Middle East, including Iraq.

The United States' blind support of Israel in the face of years of their human rights abuses, is a clear testimony to the hypocrisy of our real policy in the Middle East.  Our actions shout that we are no lovers of freedom and justice.

Israel's policy toward the Palestinian natives has been similar to our policy of Manifest Destiny by which white settlers and the U.S. Army killed off the Native Americans so we could grab their best land.  Any resistance was grounds for slaughter, justified by the need for the safety of our settlers.  Natives who survived were segregated on "reservations" on the least desirable land.

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Zionist Israel's efforts to kill or squeeze Palestinians off their rightful property has been a brazen slow-motion real estate swindle.  We shouldn't support this and we shouldn't be surprised if Palestinians and the rest of the Muslim world resent our part in it.

Think of the money the American taxpayers would save if the U.S. stopped subsidizing Israel and guarding the corrupt regimes of our allies in the Middle East!  Think of the benefit to our economy and to individual wage-earners if that money were left in our economy, to protect the real interests of the American people, not the interests of kings and military dictators elsewhere.

If Osama Got His Way

Yes, we would begin paying more for our gasoline at the pump, instead of paying a high defense and foreign aid budget to artificially keep the price at the pump low.  I have found estimates of the true cost of imported oil: between $5.28 and roughly $11.35 per gallon at the pump, depending on how they are calculated (Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.org and SetAmericaFree.org). Consider, too, that we would no longer be killing innocents and waiting for the revenge of their relatives, etc., in the form of terrorist attacks.  No longer could our government use the pretext of potential terrorist attacks as reason for us to surrender our civil freedoms at home.

[This is the right thing to do, whether you look at it from its alignment with all the major teachings of world religions or you simply look at what is going to help the human race survive in a nuclear-armed world.  How can it be anything but pragmatic to work out our differences with an enemy that, sooner or later, will have nuclear weapons, too?  Fighting as our first option to get our way - irrespective of the human rights and pursuit of freedom by other nations - has become too risky in a world of big and small countries who have aaccess to nuclear and other WMDs.  We need real diplomacy, not threats, to prevent a war in which all on earth will - to one extent or the other - lose.]

All that the American people hope to gain by the unsustainable situation in the Middle East under our military empire can be gained freely through goodwill and free commerce with the common peoples' chosen representatives of that region.

We want their oil.  They will sell it to somebody, (unless we permanently antagonize them by our years of killing and denying their free will)why shouldn't it be us?  Rather than trying to coerce the Middle Eastern nations to be ruled by kings and generals they don't democratically support, why not let them sort it our for themselves?  If we're good, we can buy the oil from whomever comes out on top.  (In the long run, we need to be developing alternatives to imported oil.  That is another way to de-fund Osama and al-Qaeda.  I will leave for another article, a simple suggestion for removing the profits from the heroin trade.)

Have you ever noticed that all the realistic solutions of problems of terrorism and drugs are not deemed worthy of discussion?  Could that be because there is too much money riding on maintaining the deadly status quo?

We, in the USA could stop worrying about where and when the next terrorist attack will take place.  We could stop wasting money and time standing in long lines at airports, waiting for our turn at humiliation by the morons of the Homeland Security Agency.

It will take real diplomacy and humility to sit down and admit we were wrong to kill so many innocent civilians of the Muslim world.  It will take real courage to do the right thing, instead of the misguidedly expedient thing dictated by American commercial interests (Big Oil and the Military Industrial Complex), but we common people have so much to gain.

I'll cut to the chase scene, folks.  Here's the choice we're faced with: a long, drawn-out slide into bankruptcy and a military dictatorship right here, punctuated by the inevitable nuclear terrorist attacks on major American cities; OR, we can demand of our corrupt leaders that they end this insanity and end our war on countries in the Middle East who only want the same thing we wanted in 1776 - Freedom to live as they choose, freedom of government, religion, and lifestyle.

(The USA is always saying we want more democracies in the Middle East, so why don't we put it to a vote of the people in Saudi Arabia?  Or in Kuwait?  What the people there would come up with would probably not be a choice we would approve, though.  Too bad, it's their country, not ours - let's remember that.)

So...shall we continue to keep the military pressure on the people of the Middle East to do what they don't want to do?  Or do we sit down and listen to the common people, not the kings and military puppets we have installed?

It's time for humanity to evolve beyond war as a means of resolving disputes.  In the age of the portable suitcase nuke, it's only a matter of time before the U.S. begins to experience the suffering we have only inflicted on other countries heretofore.

The sense I get from all the books and articles I've read about the Muslim psychology is that they will not back down even in the face of death, because they believe they are in the right.  We've seen a lot of evidence of this belief, from the suicide pilots of 9/11 to the legions of suicide bombers.

Shall we act now to prevent Armageddon, or let our deranged leaders escalate and involve all the world in it?  It's really that simple.

Are we smart enough to choose to evolve morally and spiritually along the lines that our religious leaders have advocated for 2000 years?  If not, then "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," may take on a darkly prophetic meaning, but eternally true.

What would we like other countries and people to do unto us?  It's our choice.

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Paul Kemp awoke to the realities of American politics as a Conscientious Objector and war resister during the Vietnam era.  He is an entrepreneur and writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He welcomes feedback through his website, www.defending-your-retirement.com/