> Al-Qaeda is quite a bit more than Al Capone, and the Taliban (and Saudi
> Arabia and its collaborators in the Pakistani ISI) are quite a bit more than
> corrupt cops on the beat.
Not at all. They have more guns than Capone, and a slicker ideology. But structurally they're the unwitting and unconscious product of the total system, fanatics of petroleum-rents instead of alcohol-rents, and just as powerless in the end. This is the secret, incidentally, of every Mafia movie ever made: the good ones tie the violence of the total system to a coherent micropolitics, replaying the struggle for corporate market share as melodrama.
The Osama video really said it all: OBL is hanging out with his cronies, and then the cleric trucked in from Saudi Arabia went on and on about how S11 was causing this upsurge of interest in Islam across the world -- as if the whole thing was a ghastly marketing stunt, which, on some level, it was.
-- Dennis (the double-dashed one)