Гор Видал - Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace

Where does Osama's money now come from? He is a superb fund-raiser for Allah but only within the Arab world; contrary to legend, he has taken no CIA money. He warned the Saudi king that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait. Osama assumed that after his own victories as a guerrilla against the Russians, he and his organization would be used by the Saudis to stop the Iraqis. To Osama's horror, King Fahd sent for the Americans: thus were infidels established on the sacred soil of Mohammed. "This was," he said, "the most shocking moment of my life." "Infidel," in his sense, does not mean anything of great moral consequence — like cheating sexually on your partner; rather it means lack of faith in Allah — the one God — and in his prophet Mohammed.

Osama persuaded four thousand Saudis to go to Afghanistan for military training by his group. In 1991, Osama moved on to Sudan. In 1994, when the Saudis withdrew his citizenship, Osama was already a legendary figure in the Islamic world and so, like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, he could tell the royal Saudis, "I banish you. There is a world elsewhere." Unfortunately, that world is us.

In a twelve-page "declaration of war," Osama presented himself as the potential liberator of the Muslim world from the great Satan of modern corruption, the United States.

Osama's organization blew up two of our embassies in Africa, and put a hole in the side of an American warship off Yemen, Clinton lobbed a missile at a Sudanese aspirin factory, and so on to the events of Black Tuesday. G. W. Bush was then transformed before our eyes into the cheerleader that he had been in prep school. First he promised us not only "a new war" but a "secret war" and, best of all, according to the twinkle in his eye, "a very long war." Meanwhile, "this administration will not talk about any plans we may or may not have. We're going to find these evildoers and we're going to hold them accountable," along with the other devils who have given Osama shelter.

As of the first month of 2002, the Pentagon Junta pretends that the devastation of Afghanistan by our highflying air force has been a great victory (no one mentions that the Afghans were not an American enemy — it was like destroying Palermo in order to eliminate the Mafia). In any case, we may never know what, if anything, was won or lost (other than much of the Bill of Rights).

A member of the Pentagon Junta, Rumsfeld, a skilled stand-up comic, daily made fun of a large group of "journalists" on prime-time TV. At great, and often amusing, length, Rummy tells us nothing about our losses and their losses. He did seem to believe that the sentimental Osama was holed up in a cave on the Pakistan border instead of settled in a palace in Indonesia or Malaysia, two densely populated countries where he is admired and we are not. In any case, never before in our long history of undeclared unconstitutional wars have we, the American people, been treated with such impish disdain — so many irrelevant spear carriers to be highly taxed (those of us who are not rich) and occasionally invited to participate in the odd rigged poll.

When Osama was four years old I arrived in Cairo for a conversation with Nasser, to appear in Look magazine. I was received by Mohammed Hekal, Nasser's chief adviser. Nasser himself was not to be seen. He was at the Barricade, his retreat on the Nile; he had just survived an assassination attempt. Hekal spoke perfect English; he was sardonic, worldly. "We are studying the Koran for hints on birth control." A sigh.

"Not helpful?"

"Not very. But we keep looking for a text." We talked off and on for a week. Nasser wanted to modernize Egypt. But there was a reactionary, religious element. Another sigh. Then a surprise. "We've found something very odd, the young village boys — the bright ones that we are educating to be engineers, chemists and so on, are turning religious on us."

"Right wing?"

"Very." Hekal was a spiritual son of our eighteenth-century enlightenment. I thought of Hekal on Dark Tuesday when one of his modernized Arab generation had, in the name of Islam, struck at what had been, forty years earlier, Nasser's model for a modern state. Yet Osama seemed, from all accounts, no more than a practicing, as opposed to zealous, Muslim. Ironically, he was trained as an engineer. Understandably, he dislikes the United States as symbol and as fact. But when our clients, the Saudi royal family, allowed American troops to occupy the Prophet's holy land, Osama named the fundamental enemy "the Crusader Zionist Alliance." Thus, in a phrase, he defined himself and reminded his critics that he is a Wahabi Muslim, a Puritan activist not unlike our Falwell/ Robertson zanies, only serious. He would go to war against the United States, "the head of the serpent." Even more ambitiously, he would rid all the Muslim states of their western-supported regimes, starting with that of his native land. The word "Crusader" was the giveaway. In the eyes of many Muslims, the Christian west, currently in alliance with Zionism, has for a thousand years tried to dominate the lands of the Umma — the true believers. That is why Osama is seen by so many simple folk as the true heir to Saladin, the great warrior king who defeated Richard of England and the western crusaders.

Who was Saladin? Dates 1138–1193. He was an Armenian Kurd. In the century before his birth, western Christians had established a kingdom at Jerusalem, to the horror of the Islamic Faithful. Much as the United States used the Gulf War as pretext for our current occupation of Saudi Arabia, Saladin raised armies to drive out the Crusaders. He conquered Egypt, annexed Syria, and finally smashed the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a religious war that pitted Mohammedan against Christian. He united and "purified" the Muslim world and though Richard Lion-heart was the better general, in the end he gave up and went home. As one historian put it, Saladin "typified the Mohammedan utter self-surrender to a sacred cause." But he left no government behind him, no political system because, as he himself said, "My troops will do nothing save when I ride at their head. " Now his spirit has returned with a vengeance.

The Bush administration, though eerily inept in all but its principal task, which is to exempt the rich from taxes, has casually torn up most of the treaties to which civilized nations subscribe — like the Kyoto Accords or the nuclear missile agreement with Russia. The Bushites go about their relentless plundering of the Treasury — and now, thanks to Osama, Social Security (a supposedly untouchable trust fund), which, like Lucky Strike green, has gone to a war currently costing us $3 billion a month. They have also allowed the FBI and CIA either to run amok or not budge at all, leaving us, the very first "indispensable" and — at popular request — last global empire, rather like the Wizard of Oz doing his odd pretend-magic tricks while hoping not to be found out. Meanwhile, G.W. booms, "Either you are with us or you are with the Terrorists." That's known as asking for it.

To be fair, one cannot entirely blame the current Oval One for our incoherence. Though his predecessors have generally had rather higher IQs than his, they, too, assiduously served the 1 percent that owns the country while allowing everyone else to drift. Particularly culpable was Bill Clinton. Although the most able chief executive since FDR, Clinton, in his frantic pursuit of election victories, set in place the trigger for a police state that his successor is now happily squeezing.

Police state? What's that all about? In April 1996, one year after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a so-called conference bill in which many grubby hands played a part, including the bill's cosponsor, Senate Majority leader Dole. Although Clinton, in order to win elections, did many unwise and opportunistic things, he seldom, like Charles II, ever said an unwise one. But faced with opposition to antiterrorism legislation that not only gives the attorney general the power to use the armed services against the civilian population, neatly nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, it also, selectively, suspends habeas corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty. Clinton attacked his critics as "unpatriotic." Then, wrapped in the flag, he spoke from the throne: "There is nothing patriotic about our pretending that you can love your country but despise your government." This is breathtaking since it includes, at one time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German in 1939 who said that he detested the Nazi dictatorship unpatriotic?