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The Search for Osama Bin Ladin
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8 The Search for Osama Bin Ladin November 15, 2001 It seems to me that we should look at the world in terms of what would be best for our children and all children. Here comes the Northern Alliance which used to be the Soviet side and which was the side we attacked when Osama Bin Laden was fighting for us. The Afghani women we have heard from remind us that the Northern Alliance was in charge of their country from 1992 to 1996. They are considered to be rapists and looters. These Afghani women state that the Northern Alliance will simply intensify ethnic and religious conflicts and will fan the fires of an endless civil war. They give the example of the recent massacres that took place in Mazar-e-Sharif. These women are appealing to the United Nations and to the world to send in an effective peace keeping force before the Northern Alliance can repeat their crimes of 1992-1996. We will never attempt to justify what took place in New York City and Washington on September 11, 2001. And we must never attempt to justify the bombing of Afghanistan either. The end does not justify the means. And apparently, there is no end. Any deficient leadership can start a war. But that same leadership can rarely stop a war. Allegedly, we went to war to find someone who was living in Afghanistan. After a rain of 15,000 pound bombs, fuel air bombs and cluster bombs, it would seem difficult to identify our suspect either dead or alive. Just think about the means used to give this victory to the dubious leadership of the Northern Alliance. Under a cloak of secrecy we used weapons of mass destruction. Untold numbers of innocent civilians have been slaughtered. There is a history of this searching for one man and slaughtering many. On Christmas of 1989 we were searching for Manuel Norriega in Panama. In that search, Stealth Bombers blew away the neighborhoods of El Chorillo and San Miguelito in Panama City. But we 9 got our man who is now languishing in a federal prison. Then there was the search for Saddam Hussein. 500,000 troops went looking for him, bombs have been falling on Iraq for over ten years, an embargo has led to some 5,000 Iraqi children dying every month. And Saddam is just fine, thank you. He eats well and remains free. And now the search for Osama can go on for ever. It has become kind of a “Where’s Waldo” situation. Maybe he is in Iraq; let’s do more bombing over there, maybe he’s in Syria, let’s bomb over there. And what does this do to the spiritual and physical environment of the world? The world military at peace is the biggest threat to the spiritual and physical environment because of its ideology of might makes right. The physical toxicity of the military has become obvious in the United States where no superfund is large enough to clean up the nuclear waste. Well if the military at peace is the biggest single threat to the environment, what about the military at war? The military at war is planetary suicide. The planet cannot be sustained with the military at war. Nuclear weapons are planet busters. They will make our beautiful planet look like the Moon, like Pluto or Mars. There will be simply not be anyone left at home. Here is a case where our purported victory in Afghanistan might be used foster new and uglier wars as well as perpetuate the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. It appears to be a Phyrric victory. ...