Osama and Me

Blinded by horror, I could not fathom Osama bin Laden’s motives at the time of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. How indeed could I understand the intentions of a mass murderer, whose hatred of America festered like gangrenous rat pus in a psychic dungeon. But now I do understand. Of course, I could never condone the slaughter of innocent people. Given my pacifist sensibilities, I don’t even condone the killing of the culpable during times of war. But to understand is not to condone. It is rather to shine a klieg light into the darkest corners of the human mind and find that Osama may not be crouching alone in that lair.

Osama bin Laden knows the American psyche far better than we know ourselves. He knew that we would respond to the humiliation of the attack on the World Trade Center by lashing out in a crazed frenzy of vengeance and bloodlust. He knew that Americans would show so little respect for the Arab world that we would ignore distinctions between the secular Arab world of Saddam Hussein and the fundamentalist one of bin Laden. He probably even hoped that in our frenzy of militarism, we might rid him of his sworn enemy, the anti-Islamicist Saddam Hussein.

Osama orchestrated 9/11 in order to spark the kind of arrogant over-reaction that would reveal our shadow to the world. Hatred of America once limited to the Middle East, now encircles the globe. Even our European allies have distanced themselves from this Administration, watching in shock and horror as we plunge Iraq into civil war and defecate on the Geneva Conventions.

So how have we allowed ourselves to be manipulated by a terrorist? We are arrogant rather than introspective. We disdain looking inwards, exploring the emotional landscape of our nationhood. We project violence onto other nations and religions without for an instance recognizing the role violence plays in our own national melodramas. We claim strategic interests in countries that we refuse to learn anything about.

As long as we maintain a semblance of democracy at home and a sufficiently high standard of living, most Americans don’t care to know what impact our foreign policy decisions are having on other societies. Operating from a base of such infinitesimal self-knowledge, we as a nation made ourselves vulnerable to the likes of bin Laden. Perhaps we will learn from this shameful episode in our history. Or maybe now that we are bathing in the blood of the innocent, 200 times more bathtubs' full than what bin Laden spilled on September 11, we will no longer need to search him out. Surely the blood sacrifice of more than half a million people will have earned us the privilege of joining him in the same dark cave of the soul he retreated into long ago.