Bin Laden's demise won't make the world a safer place.

There may be much merriment at the demise of US capitalism’s former partner in crime Osama Bin Laden who has now been sent down the same road as another old US ally Saddam Hussein. But the cost of such a disastrous foreign policy that led to this is staggering. It is staggering with regards to human life, something that is very difficult to determine because US capitalism doesn’t do a body count on its victims.

The cost in terms of American deaths is much smaller but when we add the families of the deceased, the wives, husbands, children parents, it too is dramatic. Then there is the psychological damage in the aftermath of war and the physical damage that is significant given that more American lives are saved by more efficient armor but this means more injuries. As we pointed out in an earlier blog, the rate of double amputees has tripled. The injured are added costs that will be borne for decades to come. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes estimated a couple of years ago that the Iraq war alone cost the US taxpayer some $3 trillion. (And you wonder why they’re cutting education and social services)

Most American workers will not agree with me here but as I have said many times before, the roots of terrorism and the rise of types like Bin Laden are firmly in the fertile soil of US foreign policy. CIA assassinations of leaders like Lumumba and Walter Rodney, the overthrow of democratic regimes like in Iran in 1953 and the support of dictators around the world from Mobutu to Marcus, Mubarak to Pinochet, the Shah of Iran to the Saudi monarchists, has brought us where we are today.

The US/Saudi partnership gave bin Laden and the Mullahs some $40 billion which gave the Islamists the edge against the Soviet supported government of Mohammad Najibullah. The Islamists tortured, castrated and murdered him, hanging his body from a lamppost. The Saudis rule through terror in their own country, something they are able to do only because of US military hardware. The Saudi’s are so hated by many Arab workers and those longing for democratic rights because of their vicious repression and their links to the Pentagon and Washington that it is directed also at Saudi’s in general. One Saudi woman describes this:

"Yes so many Arabs hate the Saudis. I was in Morocco a couple of weeks ago and I couldn't believe how much they hate the regime. I had to conceal my identity and say that I am Lebanese to avoid hostility. Even among the Berbers who can hardly speak Arabic, I found anger. I am not surprised, the Saudis have turned their country into a seasonal bordello for regime geriatrics, suffering from permanent impotency! Tunisians in Paris hate our guts for sheltering their dictator. I think all this reveals good signs, the end is approaching." From the Angry Arab Blog

The fact is that individuals who call themselves “American” have inflicted far greater human misery and environmental damage on the people’s of the world, including Americans, than Bin Laden ever did. But it is this notion of patriotism and nationalism that prevents people from considering this. After 911 US trade representative Robert Zoellick, “Argued for a display of global solidarity” writes the Financial Times today. This too angers many people around the world, the arrogance of it. Death is always tragic, but where was the call from Washington for global solidarity when the US was dropping dioxin on the Vietnamese and killed three to four million of them? What about the 600,000 or more dead civilians in Cambodia through Nixon and Kissinger’s dirty illegal war there?

And what was it Madeline Albright said when she was asked about the US enforced sanctions against Hussein leading to the deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children, oh yes, “It was worth it” she said.

Just like the Team Concept that the bosses and Union leaders push (The AFL-CIO’s Trumka is now pushing "buy American" another disastrous policy that will harm US workers) is against workers interests, it is against our interests to blindly support US foreign policy simply because we’re all “American” (Same of any other nationality). The NAZI’s in Germany were German, but not all German’s were Nazi’s. We have no independent voice and we have to change that.

We shouldn’t have been in Vietnam. A better position for US workers and all workers with regards to the Mohammad Najibullah government in Afghanistan before the US supported Taliban overthrew it would have been for us to have given it critical support instead of giving our tax money to the Mullahs. This would have given it an alternative to the Stalinists (they collapsed under their own weight anyway) and would have weakened the Islamists. Had we an independence voice we wouldn’t have supported the Shah of Iran and the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh, nor the regime of Saddam Hussein or the absolute monarchs.

The Financial Times points out today that since 911 the direct cost of the US response to 911 is $2 trillion. Stiglitz’s estimate is much higher. The Times quotes the Congressional Research Office estimates as Iraq $806 billion, Afghanistan $443 billion, homeland security costs since 911, $690 billion plus another $417 billion in extras related to security. There will be much more to come.

The uprisings in the Arab world have shown the irrelevance and failure of terrorist methods and the indiscriminate killing of workers and civilians. Bin Laden by most accounts was pretty irrelevant. By the CIA’s own account there are only a hundred or so al Qaeda in Afghanistan being chased by 100,000 American troops.

Alan Beattie wrote in the Financial Times today that “Bin Laden may have landed a lot of costs on the shoulders of American taxpayers, but he conspicuously failed to end western capitalism as we know it.”.

Beattie is right about that. The method of Bin Laden and those like him is bankrupt and reactionary; it cannot end capitalism, Bin Laden was not opposed to capitalism. In the board-rooms of the corporations and the halls of Congress and Parliaments of the Capitalist world, they recognize that workers find such methods repugnant; at best, they are costly but the capitalist class does not fear them. What they fear is a different method, the methods of the working class like those we have seen throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

It is the working class acting independently and relying on our own strength, our own political voice and challenging them for the control of the workplace that they fear and spend untold billions preventing .

As long as we don’t get fooled by all the nationalistic and patriotic diversions, as long as our actions are always aimed at uniting the working class internationally and that means challenging racism, sexism and sectarianism that makes such unity impossible they have every reason to fear us.