It's OK to be disgusted with the US' Second World status (Powell, of course, is our caudillo). But you're assuming that the US is the Prime Mover of the world-system, and this just isn't so. The EU and East Asia are in charge, and they don't want indiscriminate slaughter, they want a contained police action. What makes you think they won't get what they want?
-- Dennis
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It remains to be seen what the out come will be, how contained, how discriminate, and whether the EU and EA will be secured from various terrorist attacks---and in the case of EA whether the US actions will not help de-stabilize their political systems. According to my Vietnamese workmate, the local Vietnamese newspaper reports this as a US holy war against Islam---I assume this refers to the riots in Indonesia, but Loi B doesn't speak English well enough for me to be sure. In terms of power and the power to deliver the heads of the guilty, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia hardly count as allies. The real allies the US needs are Iran and Pakistan, where the first is an enemy and the second is so shaky its likely to devolve into civil war. On the other hand, Bush is in China theoretically trying to shore up a crashed US economy---where I am sure bin Laden is probably the main topic--so I agree to a limited extent. I think it is funny that Bush feels safer in China than he does in SF.
But the main implication to most of the questions here about WTC and the Pentagon attacks were what should the response be from progressive and left people here, in the US. And, it seemed to me that everybody just forgot their own government has spent about twenty years dismantling and then shitting on every progressive or even humanitarian program and policy in the country. So I thought it was best to remind everybody, who we are dealing with here.
And sure the UN or some client state could bring bin Laden and Al Qaeda to the Hague for the US as a proxy, but this is a little unseemly for Empire, don't you think? Besides have we paid up our UN dues lately? I suspect these kinds of favors between nations are expensive.
I am not a big fan of exterminating bin Laden and others. I kind of like what happened to Sirhan Sirhan---remember him? There is something quite nasty about being in prison, as history erases almost all public memory of your actions while you live on to watch your own effacement. And, there are also all the wonderful humiliations of a vast spectacle of a trial----something like the OJ affair, drawn out, prolonged by endless legal maneuvers, change of venue, bad juries, bad judges, ridiculous appeals, FBI foul ups, exposes of CIA involvement, US attorney teams as media stars, demonstrations, riots between fanatics outside the trial, the whole circus atmosphere. I can't imagine anything closer to hell that going through something like that, knowing that at the end of the day, prison and anonymity is waiting.
Chuck Grime