Michael, you may already have seen this. here is something by someone who knew something about osama bin laden
I am afraid however that if Eqbal Ahmad has captured the sense of the Arab people, then we are now entering a period of ever intensifying conflict. the US cannot afford for its House of Saud with its petrodollars and oil supply to be toppled--it would represent a far greater loss than even the Shah's Iran and we should thus expect that Bush intends to leave many of the deployed troops in the the region--while the Arab masses seem no longer willing to endure their regimes especially since they invited the so called American infidels to occupy their holiest land. Where this conflict takes us I cannot say, but it is not irrational to fear an escalating cycle of neo colonial violence and terrorist reprisal. Unlike Hitchens, I think the biggest problem is with the US govt. The US supports regimes that brook no democratic opposition; the only kind of dissent that can survive in such a politically parched environment are elitist terrorist organizations which eqbal ahmad, like me, abhored as a rejection of every political value for which he stood. OBL wouldn't be such a menace if he did not have such a hold on discontented people. Instead of the Arab people cooperating in putting down terrorist organizations, they seem to be rallying to their defense, but we need their cooperation! We don't want them to hate us. My stomach turns every time i see a poor brown person declaiming my country on the television. The US forced glasnost on South Korea and the Soviet Union but it doesn't put pressure on its west asian clients to allow any kind of democracy to flourish. It's almost as if the US wants govts in power that can blithely ignore the needs of people so as to better serve US interests at the peoples' expense. But America stands for democracy, and we should make that clear. If we live up to our values--democracy, the bill of rights, things like that--i know those brown kids will come to love my country as i do. And they'll want to help us in stamping out the barbarians in their midst. By the way, in the quote below, Ahmad suggests where exactly the coverage by the bourgeois press breaks off. Eqbal Ahmad in an interview (8/24/98) soon after the bombing of the American embassies (reprinted in Confronting Empire. South End Press, 2000): "To date, no one has examined what has produced Osama bin Laden. There have been hints that he worked with the CIA, that he first engaged in violence because he was brought in to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The US and the Saudis financed it. But this is not enough. No one has identified how his country, Saudi Arabia, has been robbed by Western corporations and Western powers. No one has identified what bin Laden grew up seeing. The Saudi princes, this one family state, have handed over the oil resources of the Arab world to the West and investment firms. He has seen it being robbed. All through this time, he had only one satisfaction: his country is not occupied. There are no American, French or British troops in his country. Then he realizes, in the early 1990s, that even this small pleasure has been taken away from him. He has already been socialized by the CIA, armed by the Americans, and trained to believe deeply that when a foreigner comes into your land, you become violent. You fight. That was what the jihad in Afghanistan was about... "In the early 1980s a fairly senior CIA official wrote a very interesting article "The American threat to Saudi Arabia'...under the name of Abdul Qasim Mansoor. He took an Arab name to hide his identity. His argument primarily was the policies that the US govt and corporations were pursuing out of greed were going to turn Saudi Arabia into another Iran, a totally dependent state and one extremely vulnerable to revolution. Osama bin Laden is a sign of things to come. The US has no reason to stay in Saudi Arabia except exploitation and greed. Saudi Arabia is not threatened with invasion by anyone that we know of. Any potential agressor, such as Saddam Hussein, has already been knocked out. "Moreover, the Americans demonstrated in 1991 that they are capable of mobilizing against any attack on an ally in the Middle East. What then is the justification of an American military and intelligence presence in Saudi Arabia. Every ministry is infiltrated with American advisers. It is creating deep discontent there...Saudi wealth is invested in the US and Europe. The Saudis went into the arms market early int eh 80s. The US has dumped something like 100 billion dollars' worth of armaments in ttat place. The Saudi people are going to be discontented. Fisk is totally right. "I want to add something else. Saudi discontent shouldn't be seen only as Saudi. Unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia is an Arab country and is part of the Arab world. Therefore, the discontents that occur in it are also occuring around it. The Arabs are at the moment an extremely humiliated, frustrated and beaten, and insulted people. They are the guardians of our Muslim holy places, they have not been able to guard them. They are the only peole who since the creatin of the UN have lost territory to invaders and not been able to regain it... "They have a wealth of oil, and that wealth is not reaching them. Their oil wells ahve been separated from their people. Tribes have been given flags: Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi tribe has been given a state in order to separate that oil from the people. These are issues that the media should at least have looked into. they don't have to agree with this analysis, but they must look into the history of the conflict. Terrorism is not without a history. All social phenomena have historical roots. Nobody here is looking into the historical roots of terror." rb
