An Empire Celebrates a Man’s Murder

American President Barack Obama did not miss the opportunity presented by the anniversary of the assassination of the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, without making election capital out of it. President Obama presented it as a “great” victory achieved by a man who wants to tell Americans that his predecessor, Bush, and — by extension — Obama’s Republican rivals were the ones who made the legend of bin Laden, while Obama was the one who was able to bury him, or almost.

Obama traveled in secret to Afghanistan to celebrate the anniversary of the victory of the greatest empire in human history over an isolated man living with his three wives and his guards (his servants and secretaries, to be precise) in a distant house in a region of Pakistan called Abbottabad in an showy mission doubtless undertaken in coordination with their Pakistani counterparts. The matter did not really warrant a military parade, airplanes and commando units, or even Obama and his aides isolating themselves for hours while waiting for the good news.

Of course, there is another dimension to Obama’s latest visit, as seen in the emphasis that the retreat from Afghanistan was just about to take place, although the secrecy of the visit and the resonant operation which the Taliban carried out within hours of the president’s departure have confirmed that the results of the war on that movement will be in no better state than the result of the war on al-Qaida, including the occupation of Iraq. Supremacy is wanted in order to convince the Americans that it is “honorable,” even though it isn’t.

The state of Osama bin Laden’s war on the United States was not in the interest of the states by any regional standard, unless they viewed him as leader of a rival empire and not as a solitary man from whom his supporters had turned away upon finding themselves faced with a war and expulsion from place to place. (Didn’t Osama bin Laden live in Saudi Arabia before they turned him out and forced him to return, once again, to Afghanistan?)

Terrorism — and the extent of the losses suffered by the United States during its wars waged in the name of bin Laden — confirms that defeat was their destiny and not the destiny of the man who knew that he would inevitably be killed. What kept him alive all these years after the Sept. 11 attacks was a different location from the others where America was defeated, to say nothing of the celebration of the operation that killed him and of its first anniversary.

In the selected documents leaked from bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad, we stumble across the reality of a man living an austere, simple life with his three wives and children while striving to provide a means of communication for the leadership of al-Qaida. Those leaders are the ones that America’s unpiloted planes snatched, one after the other, from the offshoots that proliferated and relied upon a leader who, nonetheless, did not have a binding opinion on what they were doing.

In the leaked documents, we come across the true character of Osama bin Laden, which those who knew him have spoken about for years. It was a character that did not accept many of the operations that had been carried out in the organization’s name in numerous regions, whether in Iraq or elsewhere.

Osama bin Laden used to be concerned with acquiring a republic of Muslims, and perhaps this was the secret behind the sympathy many people had for him personally, despite their refusal to accept the practices of those groups that remained obedient to him. In the documents we find the rejection of many of those practices and evidence that he considered that some elements of al-Qaida had “committed errors and abused goodwill” by killing many Muslims during their operations. He asked his aide, Atiya Abdul Rahman, to call every local prince or leader to attention over the necessity of avoiding the “unnecessary civilian losses” that might harm the organization. He considered that “a sin such as those mistakes is not simple,” and that the spilling of Muslim blood was a deviation from the path of jihad.

Whatever the issue, the operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden was similar in all its details. The story afterward began with his corpse’s burial at sea and concluded with the demolition of the house where he used to live, selling the stones used to construct it for bricks! A scandal of the American Empire made it appear more triumphant. This is what emerged from its battle with bin Laden: America, weakened from its wounds, has been pushed back from the rank of “supreme power over the world,” to merely one of its greatest powers.

It is the arrogance of power that takes possession of great empires and pushes them into foolish, exorbitantly costly adventures. Doubtless what happened is a lesson to everyone who thinks of entering into a conflict with a nation of a billion and a half people under any pretext. It is a lesson for China or Russia, for example, which have become embroiled in antagonizing Arabs and Muslims by supporting the criminal regime in Syria.