what price victory?

So Osama Bin Laden is, apparently, dead – but at what cost to America, the West and the rest of the world? I can’t help feeling that we, and the US in particular, mishandled the whole 9/11 catastrophe. At the beginning of a new millennium, attacked, all we could do was to resort to an eye for an eye. Worse, we used it as cover to attack an Iraq that clearly had nothing to do with the attack on the Twin Towers. A bunch of extremist lunatics attack the greatest power on Earth and, ten years later, that power has almost bankrupted itself pursuing wars of revenge… and I’m not just talking money here, for it seems to me that moral capital has been squandered…

Posted by Ricardo

writer and blogger

6 Replies to “what price victory?”

  1. Wwweeelllll, they haven’t nearly bankrupted themselves pursuing wars of revenge, have they. These WoR haven’t helped, but given the yearly U.S. defence budget (and the sales of equipment resulting from new world orders, etc.) they’ll probably do quite nicely out of it.

    Did anyone notice that, after the British PM visited the newly democratic Egypt with his entourage of arms dealers, air strikes on Libya came very quickly, and everytime something was taken out by British aricraft, there seemed to be an obligation for the press to report that it was a ‘British Brimstone missile’ – maybe I’m just being needlessly suspicious…

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  2. Daniel Cardoso pointed to this – a fascinating insight on all this here… that gives a rather sad take on Obama crowing victory…

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    1. Daniel Cardoso 2nd May 2011 at 11:46 am

      The irony is that many people took comfort in the fact that they had forced this ghost, this representation of Evil, into the underground, into a hellish and bare living, as befits any demon. But now, now that it is known that he was living no such life, that detail matters not, that small victory was quickly and conveniently forgotten.
      Public wrath should be coming out of this, not celebrations. People didn’t have a political approach to this situation, they never had. It’s all about ghosts and the boogey man.

      How sad, how quaint, and how lovely for you, who cares so much for Jungian archetypes. *grin*

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      1. not entirely sure I understand what you’re getting at with the last sentence… I am curious why you think “public wrath should be coming out of this”? I do agree with you that there never has been any political approach to Bin Laden. And you’re right, it seems to me, to point out the Jungian connection – because what was allowed to happen was that Bin Laden was turned into an archetype – and like Obi Wan Kenobi – this made him more powerful than his enemies could imagine. In the West we did not deal with this on our own terms at all – instead we simply ‘reacted’ – a mere reflex of revenge – that any therapist would tell you reveals more about the unstable mental state of the ‘reactor’ than it does about what he is reacting to… This in essence seems to me the ultimate tragedy of this situation – a tragedy that today’s reactions of celebration have merely deepened…

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        1. Daniel Cardoso 2nd May 2011 at 10:19 pm

          I was getting at exactly what you said – we turned him into an archetype (which will surely give you plenty to dissert about, that was my pun) and thus we, ‘the West’, are the ones that need analyzing, not ‘them”. (Whatever those categories mean, I hate those words!)

          As for the public wrath: for ten years, americans have been told that Mr. Supreme Boogey Man of Evil is hiding away in dark and esconsed caves in the butthole of the world. Now after ten years, it’s more like ‘Oh, by the way, Mr. Supreme Boogey Man of Evil has been hiding away in a luxurious mansion, protected by our allies who, due to internal reasons, have tired with him and decided to hand him to us as he’s too much of a nag.’

          …Really?

          I mean… really?!

          Is the majority of America’s population that obtuse?

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          1. *wide grin* I take your point… It’s all smoke ‘n’ mirrors – the real political situation, that is – do we ever really know what’s going on? And then there are the layers of confusion, incompetence and the limits of our power and knowledge…

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