Osama Bin Laden: Man Of The Year? How About Of The Decade?

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
Some entities name a “Person Of The Year” just to manufacture a headline. Time magazine has perhaps the most famous “choice” because they’ve been naming since 1927. Charles Lindbergh, my old neighbor in Little Falls, Minnesota, was the first. Evidently the editors of the magazine felt flying across the Atlantic from New York to Paris nonstop might start something.

Rogues, rebels, and some nice guys are often named. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made it three times, more than any other person. Sandwiching him was Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin, the two most famous murderers in history. General William Westmoreland of Vietnam fame was named in 1965. He told so many lies about the Vietnam War his press conferences in Saigon came to be known as “The Five O’Clock Follies.” Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Jerry Ford were never named by Time.

The criteria for selecting the Person of the Year is defined as the person, who “for better or worse, has done the most to influence the events of the year.”  I have chosen Osama Bin Laden as the “Person Of The Decade.” Who has changed the world more in the last decade? Here’s a guy who invested $400,000 training 20 men to hijack four passenger jets filled with U.S. citizens and fly them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the capitol building. He didn’t even waste money teaching them to take-off and land. He was mad at us because our infidel armed forces were occupying parts of Muslim territory. His tiny investment in the attacks of 9/11 has already cost us many trillions of dollars with many more trillions to come unless our politicians come to their senses. What an investment! What a return!

A cartoon in The Washington Post says it all. A huge U.S. tank is pointing its cannon at a spot in the mountains (We can assume the Pakistan-Afghanistan border) and the driver is making a pronouncement: “Okay, Al Qaeda…We will chase you to the ends of the earth and no matter what impoverished, dysfunctional nation you live in, we will invade and start counter-insurgency and try to restructure their whole society against all odds, regardless of costs….”  A small voice is heard in the mountains: “It’s working!”  It’s probably Osama.

When Nikita Kruschchev (The 1957 recipient of Time’s Man of The Year) pounded his shoe and said he was going to bury us, we listened because Russia was the other superpower. We didn’t pay much attention to the single-hornet Osama when he asked us to get out of Saudi Arabia, but when the Crawford village idiot kicked over the hornet’s nest of the Middle East by invading Iraq, all of a sudden thousands of fundamentalist wasps, hornets, and bees started to sting everybody.

Osama, one of more than 50 children of a very wealthy Saudi family, fought against the Russians, with our aid, during Russia’s misadventure in Afghanistan. Osama formed Al Queda (“The Base”) when our troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. Using militants he had fought with in Afghanistan, Osama started his campaign to drive the “infidels” out of Muslim territories. He attacked Americans in Saudi Arabia and U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania, killing over 300 people. He arranged for the 2000 suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, killing 17 and wounding 47 sailors. Osama had declared a religious war against the U.S. in the latter 1990’s with the goal of drawing us into a general war with the Muslim world. Oh, how he has succeeded. That’s why I think he is the “Person of the Decade.”

He has driven us close to financial bankruptcy. He is basically responsible for the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the U.S.. He is a big underdog, taking on a country that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and that has a navy larger than the other top 13 countries. Even with a price of $25 million on his head he has retained the loyalty of over a billion Muslims, hiding him from the prying eyes of Predators and spies. Maybe he’s in a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan!  So this “raghead,” this “camel-driver,” has already won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has already put together a list of 40,000 Iranian volunteers willing to wear suicide bombs around their waists in case we are stupid enough to invade Iran, too.

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Michael Visser of Toronto outlined our failures in Afghanistan: “After reading recent news reports about the real situation in Afghanistan, I’m noticing an eerie similarity to Vietnam at the end of the war. A corrupt, isolated president who is despised by his people and survives only by being propped up by the United States military. The assurances that the national army will soon take over the fight, in spite of the fact that it is indifferent and unreliable, suffers from a high rate of desertion and has been infiltrated by insurgents. The expanding strength of the insurgency and the inability of the United States to understand or successfully deal with the local culture. It all sounds hauntingly familiar and appears doomed to end in the same messy failure.”

At the other end of “The Person of the Decade” scale is “The Badass of the Decade” , a person who made it possible for the person of the decade to be such a success in meeting his goals. “Badass” has many meanings, but I limit the description in this choice to an ignorant, not very-bright “gunslinger” who causes trouble because he is belligerent, arrogant, and somewhat of a boob. The Lowenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania, did an IQ test of 12 presidents, six Republican, six Democrat. The average IQ of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 was 115.5. Nixon led the GOP with 155.  The average IQ of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton was 156. Slick Willie led the Dems and all others with 182, being a Rhodes Scholar and all. Poor Dubya had the lowest with 91–and his Daddy was second lowest with 98.

Maybe Lurch is the dumbest president we have ever had. I previously thought he just didn’t know anything. Frank Bruni, a Bush friend, described him this way: “The Bush I knew was part scamp and part bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster, and an adult with an inner child that often brimmed to the surface or burst through.” Maureen Dowd of the New York Times blessed him with this shot: “He can make even a global summit meeting seem like a kegger.”  And he governed like he had just attended one. He left office with a 73 percent disapproval rating while leaving the American people with a $5 trillion bill for his eight years, three times more than any other modern president.

Poor Lurch brought us the senseless war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had tried to knock off Daddy–after gaining the nation’s support in the attack on Al Queda in Afghanistan. He didn’t have the sense to declare victory and go home on December 7th, 2001 after the Northern Alliance had helped us clear the country of the Taliban. The Afghan war was necessary because a message had to be sent. The Iraq war was just stupid but it was probably Co-President Dick Cheney’s fault. Lurch brought us Abu Ghraib, the whole torture mess, regulators from industries who didn’t want to regulate industries, and economists who insisted that tax cuts would trickle down like falling stars instead of tinkling like piss. Hopefully he has destroyed the silly idea that the “free market” can take care of all economic problems. Lurch secretly approved a Constitution-busting system of spying on all Americans, again proving Samuel Johnson’s dictum that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” But perhaps the most damaging policy of all was the overwhelming support for the military-industrial-political complex which is bankrupting us.

We are building $13 billion submarines, $3.5 billion destroyers, $11 billion aircraft carriers, and 2,443 F-35 fighter planes at $118 million a copy while fighting peasants in the mountains and urban streets of Iraq and Afghanistan for ten years with M-16s and grenades. Osama has to be smiling to see his plan working so well. He is winning wars and is driving us bankrupt at the same time. With the invasion of Iraq, Osama said: “We don’t have to go to America to kill them anymore. They are coming to us.”  As of a week ago we had sent 4,403 servicemen and 13 Defense Department civilians to Iraq for killing and about 30,000 for wounding. In addition we have about 300,000 men and women with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which will cost us trillions to treat and to pay lifetime disabilities to. We have sent 1,106 servicemembers to their deaths in Afghanistan, along with two civilians. We haven’t a full accounting of the wounded yet.

Every American who knows we are at war (millions don’t know and millions don’t care) should read The Washington Post’s three-part series on our absolutely insane mess in our “Intelligence Department,” which is the oxymoron of the millenium. Osama and cohorts have to be howling with glee in their hideout in the Hamptons (I’m just starting a rumor).

Some time ago someone estimated there were about 25,000 committed Al Queda in the world. We currently have 854,000 people in the defense establishment with Top Secret clearances analyzing what the 25,000 are doing. (Hell, at one time in my military life I had one of those!) The intelligence budget is about $75 billion today, although no one is really sure. That’s 2.5 times what it was in 2001. Since 2001 we have built or are building 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work in and around Washington. These intelligence experts occupy or will occupy the equivalent space of three Pentagons, or about 17 million square feet of space.

Osama must be giggling in a frenzy now. One NSA parking lot at Fort Meade is 112 acres. The Post reports that 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism at 10,000 locations around the country. These groups put out 50,000 intelligence reports a year, or an average of 137 reports per day. No one checks to see if they are read.

Many groups are doing the same work. We currently have 51 different federal organizations in 15 cities tracking the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. Some of the work creates impossible workloads. The National Security Agency alone intercepts and files two billion e-mails, phone calls, and other types of communications every day in a possible 6,000 languages. This must send Osama into speaking in tongues. Last week we had 19,759 vacancies in intelligence agencies that required Top Secret clearances. We know we are in serious trouble when we have 9.5 percent unemployment but we can’t fill 20,000 jobs with qualified candidates!

We now have officially spent $944 billion losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with trillions already needed for the future. Here is another reason we are losing. Abdul Rahim Wardak is defense minister of Afghanistan working with President Hamid Karzai. Wardak’s son Hamed, a class valedictorian of Georgetown University and a Rhodes Scholar, serves as Karzai’s chief of staff while running his own transportation company, NCL Holdings. Hamed’s company recently was awarded a $360 million transportation contract by our Pentagon despite never having registered as a legitimate business with the government–and not having a single truck! But Karzai’s relatives own lots of trucks–and bribes for not shooting at them run about $800 per truck per trip. This is not U.S. taxpayer money going down a rathole. It’s a gusher of money running into a mammoth cave where mastodons live.

Osama has had so many victories because of our stupidity, which has increased exponentially since 2001. Because he is driving us bankrupt we have fallen from first to 12th in the ratio of adults 25-34 who have secondary degrees. Our financial disaster has trimmed higher education spending so much that excessive tuition hikes have prevented our students from even trying to go to college.

Geez, maybe Osama is the Person of the Millenium, not the Person of the Decade.
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