http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/10/07/ret.binladen.transcript/
Brutal? Certainly. Ruthless? Unquestionably. Psychotic? Not at all. He's the uncanny double of Shrub: a fundamentalist oil millionaire spawned by US petro-colonialism, facing off against the unelected oiligarch of Bananamerica -- with the Taliban's Mohammed Omar nicely counterpointed by Tony Blair. Second World neo-nationalism collides with Second World neo-nationalism. While the oiligarchies collide, the EU and East Asia are quietly switching to renewable energy, preparing the ground for the complete collapse of the oil economy over the next two decades. A doomed Empire locked into a death-struggle with a doomed periphery -- what a fitting epitaph for the American Century.
I can't help but think Carrol is right about all this. There's much to mourn about right now, but this isn't a time to be gloomy; rather, the violence of neoliberalism is finally erupting into geopolitical violence, the sort which has always accompanied revolutionary eras. The petro-periphery of Central Asia is going to explode, ushering in a period of seismic political transformation which may bring the most horrific and barbaric regimes to power; it may also spur new revolutions, and the Central Asian equivalent of Lenin, Trotsky, Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh.
I'm going to try to write this up into a coherent article, will get back to y'all soon.
-- Dennis