Eric Margolis: Old Threat Rings True Today

[StarfarerBill]

The year: 1986. I went to the grandly titled "Afghan Information Centre", a drab little office in Peshawar, Pakistan filled with pamphlets and dusty books.

The director was a short, thin man in a torn sweater named Abdullah Azzam. We spoke at length of the anti-Soviet jihad (struggle) in Afghanistan being waged by Afghan and Arab mujahedin.

Then Sheik Azzam told me, "When we have driven the Communist imperialists from Afghanistan, we will go on and drive the American imperialists from Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world."

I was floored. I had never heard anyone, save Communists, call my beloved America an imperialist power. In those days, the U.S. appeared the acme of good -- in large part because its rival, the Soviet Union, looked so wicked.

But after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, absolute power absolutely corrupted Washington's ruling circles and drove them to seek "full spectrum domination" of the globe and its energy resources.

Sheik Abdullah Azzam was the teacher and spiritual mentor of a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden.

Azzam was murdered in 1989, likely by a western intelligence service. His pupil, bin Laden, launched a seemingly Quixotic mission to overthrow the western-backed dictatorships and monarchies that misruled the Muslim world, and drive western power from the region.

Bin Laden proclaimed his grand strategy in the 1990s. He would oust the modern "crusaders" by luring the U.S. and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the U.S. economy, which he called America's Achilles' heel.

Bloody attacks would enrage the U.S. and lure it into one quagmire after another.

Presidents Bush and Obama fell right into bin Laden's trap.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/10-3

[DavidDvorkin]

1. What kind of fool thought, in 1986, that

America was the acme of good?