MGG Pillai Commentary View

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Osama Bin Laden outstares the US yet again

TIME magazine, fanned by jingoism in its backyard, decided "the person who most affect our lives, for good or ill" is not who is but who cleaned up after him. So, not Mr Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 30 Sept 2001, but Mr Rudoph Giuliani, the mayor of New York, is its Man of the Year. And broke faith with the world. In the pantheon of Western catalogue of rogues -- or evil men, in President George Bush's view -- of the past century, Mr Bin Laden would join the likes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, King Leopold of the Belgians, not for the evil ascribed to them, but to what they spawned. The world was never the same after they died; nor is after Mr Osama bin Laden's.

Mr Hitler challenged the Anglo-Saxon worldview of the world, and the world went to war; Marshal Stalin's Iron Curtain led to the Cold War of a half century. Both forced the Anglo-Saxon world to re-examine its beliefs, and fight to retain their supremacy. The genocide in King Leopold's ownership of the Belgian Congo, which set the pace for colonising Africa, and far worse than the Pol Pot horrors in Cambodia seven decades later, sped the colonisation of Africa in conditions akin to slavery. What Mr Bin Laden has done is as traumatic and dramatic: He challenges the Anglo-Saxon domination of the world through globalisation, and split the Western alliance in ways none could have imagined.

The destruction of the World Trade Centre twin towers is not about how efficiently Mr Guiliani cleaned up the mess but how it changed the Anglo-Saxon view of the world. It is easy to lump the Caucasian West into this, but it is the Anglo-Saxon world, led by the United States, that dominates, and that domination is shaken beyond repair. Years after Mr Guiliani disappears from public view, it would not be what he did but what Mr Bin Laden unleashed that would rattle not just the West but the world.

For he showed -- and I assume that what is ascribed to him are true -- how one man could challenge the the solitary superpower with a fistful of suicide bombers. and made every government vulnerable. Which is why they willingly allowed President George Bush Jr to pressgrang them into this ill-thought-out "global war on terror" the global war he unleashed. It turned quickly into a crusade, a replay of Pope Urban II's, of Christian nations against the Muslim. It was not, but with President Bush as Pope Urban II as master puppeteer, it could not be but.

Mr Bin Laden forced the United States to attack Afghanistan to remove its government more lethally, though the methods used are the same, as the Soviet Union, raining bombs and anti-personnel sleeper bombs, as in Cambodia, for the killings to go on years after peace comes. He led the US and Great Britain into a quagmire in Afghanistan, in which the new government is aligned not to Washington but to Moscow; only the interim head is pro-Washington. Nothing changed internally but that, as Robert Fisk graphically notes, one set of murderers and warlords represented by the Taliban is replaced by another from the Northern Alliance. The euphoric statements out of Afghanistan these days equalled the euphoric reportage in the Soviet Press in Moscow's presence in Afghanistan two decades earlier.

It is not, in other words, Mr Guiliani who caused this havoc but Mr Bin Laden; what he did would not rate a footnote in history but Mr Bin Laden a chapter for changing the the world "for good or ill". But Mr Bin Laden is rejected for the narrow Washington real politik view that it would ingratiate himself into the Muslim and the terrorist diaspore. TIME presumes, wrongly in my view, Mr Bin Laden needed its accolade to ingratiate himself to the Muslim and terrorist diaspora, and attract new recruits.

By pandering to the US government's fright at what Mr Evil created, TIME lost its objectivity and way. Like every newspaper and magazine in the Anglo-Saxon world known for that -- before 30 September unveiled their nakedness. As indeed every institution of note. In contrast, look at the newspapers in the European Union: all, like their governments, retained, if not enhanced, their independence, fairplay and objectivity. When newspapers become mouthpieces of governments where they matter, they cease to be what it proclaims. If the decision had been taken in the way it selected its past Men of the Year, there would be no quibble. It was not. TIME is no more what it was; and riven with conflicts between the needs of journalism and the profits its conglomerate owners demand. When that conglomerate owners are as jingoistic as the US government, journalism loses. Thanks to Mr Osama bin Laden, nor Mr Rudolph Guiliani.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my