Useful Dead or Alive
(NEW YORK) - Thanks to Washington, Osama bin Laden became for a while a relatively popular figure and symbol in an Arab and Islamic world desperate for political direction, orientation, and revolutionary leadership. Despite dismay and handwringing by some liberal pundits and others, this is just fine by Washington.

Bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization continue to be elevated in U.S. propaganda to a mythological status way beyond their actual political appeal and weight. Dead or alive, Washington’s former ally and agent is a useful foil in the pursuance of traditional and permanent U.S. political and economic interests in a crisis-ridden world capitalist order in general, and in the Middle East, Central Asian, and South Asian region in particular. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, these longstanding imperialist interests have been advanced under the banner of the "war on terrorism." The demonization of former CIA "asset" bin Laden actually idealizes him. The truth is that the appeal of bin Laden and al Qaeda is shallow and ephemeral, and always has been.

Following the September 11 attacks, Washington was able to launch a massive military buildup and campaign initially centered on Afghanistan which destroyed the Taliban regime there and decisively weakened bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist organization. The Taliban regime, which had provided a base for al Qaeda, was itself in power solely through the direct support of the U.S. client regimes of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which swiftly abandoned them after September 11.

The establishment of a U.S./UN protectorate and stable regime in Afghanistan --which is by no means complete or assured-- would put Washington in a stronger position to intervene directly and continually in the volatile labyrinth of national and class struggles in a region of immense material importance to world capitalism. In a Middle East, South-, and Central Asia of permanent instability, this intervention is the framework of the class struggle for years to come.

Washington’s major policy goals in the area include replacing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq with a pliable, Kabul-like dependency; the return of a reliable client regime in Iran; control and containment of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, aource of permanent instability; closer collaboration with the rising economic and political power of India; and progress towards reconquering the former Soviet Union for capitalism and colony. [The U.S. turn toward India, which was first accelerated under the Clinton Administration, is strategically ultimately aimed at China, which despite important encroachments of the capitalist market, retains by far the primacy of non-capitalist economic foundations and social relations.—Ike Nahem (I.N.)]

Bin Laden and September 11

In a series of video broadcasts --the most recent aired on 27 December-- Bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders supported, praised, and increasingly took direct organizational responsibility for the September 11 hijackings and attacks which killed thousands as it destroyed the World Trade Center. More attacks on civilian targets were pledged.

In mid-December, Washington released a video which showed bin Laden taking direct responsibility for the attack. [It's worth bearing in mind that bin Laden's taking credit for September 11th isn't iron proof that he and his organization are in fact responsible; it's not uncommon for armed groups to 'take credit' for attacks they didn't actually carry out. For instance, bombings are often followed by claims of responsibility by three or four different groups. --Editor] His lighthearted, joking demeanor in doing so has been seized by Washington and the big-business press to justify the continuation and development of the "long war on terrorism." Washington had no need to "fake" the video, as many still in denial over the source of the attack assert, and enjoys the demoralized spectacle of absurd conspiracy theories being circulated regarding the September 11 attack.

The most grotesque of these conspiracy theories tries to pin them on the Israeli intelligence service, with or without the cahoots of the CIA, and spreads as "evidence" the big lie that 4,000 Jews were tipped off about the attack and missed work in the World Trade Center that day. The most prominent spreader, if not originator, of this tall tale appears to be the former Pakistani intelligence chief under the Zia ul-Haq military dictatorship, former close U.S. ally and bin Laden supervisor in the anti-Soviet covert war, and ultra-right Pakistani figure Hamid Gul, who was a key supporter of the Taliban regime. [The Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, of course, has a rich history of intrigue, double-dealing, torture, and assassination in service to the policies of the Israeli state. Nevertheless, it is the height of absurdity to fantasize that such a massive conspiracy could take place without U.S. investigative bodies knowing about it. For Gul’s role, see Isabel Hilton’s article, "The Pashtun Code" in the December 3, 2001 New Yorker magazin—I.N.]

Following the Taliban collapse and the installation of a new government, utterly dependent on Washington and its fig-leaf UN-fronted "coalition", the Pentagon has been busy testing all kinds of ghoulish and devastating new weapons systems and latest targeting technology pounding the caves and mountainous areas where the routed remains of al Qaeda’s forces were holed up or fleeing over various borders. All of this has been accompanied by sensationalist reports as to the supposed chemical, biological, and nuclear plans and materials left behind in various cave bases that have been captured by U.S. armed forces and their local warlord and tribal allies. The largest and most developed caves involved are well known to Pentagon military planners and tacticians, since the CIA oversaw their construction in the course of the war fought against the Soviet Union’s ill-fated intervention in Afghanistan from 1980-86.

Bin Laden himself may very well lie beneath the rubble of some Tora Bora cave. At any rate, if and when a corpse is produced, Washington’s presentation of its "long war" will continue to shift away from bin Laden. Nevertheless, regardless of how long bin Laden remains "missing" or "at large" his mythology will eventually recede into history’s footnotes as Washington pursues it’s larger, more serious targets. Bin Laden will be chiefly remembered as Washington’s great enabler.

The Political Physiognomy of Bin Ladenism

In 1998 bin Laden issued a public call (in the form of a fatwa or "ruling" by an Islamic "scholar") that "to kill Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to." Obviously, bin Laden makes no differentiation between the people of the United States and the U.S. government and its policies.

"Anti-imperialism" for bin Laden is conflated to a crude anti-American outlook, which totally excludes U.S. workers, including those who are Black, Latino, immigrant, Arab, Muslim, and female, from any progressive role in opposition to Washington’s international policies which could link them with the struggles of their class brothers and sisters of the oppressed and exploited peoples of the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia.

Bin Laden justified his fatwa by saying that since the people of the United States pay taxes to the government, and since the government carries out policies such as support to Israel and military attacks and sanctions on Iraq, therefore they are legitimate targets. He also cited opinion polls registering "support" for such policies. He repeats the widespread diversion and conspiracy-theory canard which blames Washington’s Middle East policies and much else on the supposed domination of Jews and an international Jewish conspiracy in Washington. "We find that the Jews have the first word in the American government, which is how they use America to carry out their plans in the world, and especially the Muslim world." [This view is also common among defenders of Palestinian self-determination, who point to the "power" and "influence" of the "Zionist lobby" to explain U.S support for Israel. This is a serious political error. It puts the cart before the horse and the servant before the master. Washington does not take orders from its Israeli dependency. It is naïve in the extreme to portray Washington policymakers and strategists as gullible country bumpkins manipulated by Zionist and Jewish city slickers.

Such a view plays into traditional ultrarightist anti-semitic propaganda which elevates the power and influence of "the Jews" into a scapegoating conspiracy-mongering explanation of the world. –I.N.]

While clearly capable of spectacular terrorist action, [Al Qaeda operatives organized car-bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, which killed hundreds and wounded thousands, mostly African workers. –I.N.] bin Laden and his cadre represent no mass, popular, progressive, or anti-imperialist movement. Instead they register the retreat of such movements since the victory of the Iranian revolution of 1979.

The funding and personnel for al Qaeda come from dissolute semi-feudal, bourgeois, and professional layers in a number of Arab and Islamic countries. They are an enemy and obstacle to independent mass political action by the workers and peasants against imperialist exploitation and the reactionary neocolonial regimes that perpetuate it. While al-Qaeda and other allied terrorist groups represent no mass movement, they do appeal to and recruit out of a deepening anti-imperialist radicalization in the Arab and Islamic world and a growing hatred of Washington’s foreign policy there. This radicalization is rooted in the deepgoing economic, social, and political crisis in the Arab East, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia, where every country is strangled by economic debt and semi-feudal backwardness and politically paralyzed by decrepit and stultifying regimes propped up by imperialism, adding up to a humiliation of daily life. [A partial exception is India, the largest and most developed of the semi-colonial countries in the area. The Indians fought for their independence from British rule, established a secular capitalist regime with a relatively strong degree of workers rights and democratic space. Pakistan, by contrast, was carved out of India by the departing British colonial power through the cruel manipulation of religious division, instigating a war which killed over a million. The resultant religious confessional state of Pakistan was a stooge of British and then U.S. imperialist policy from the outset. India, on the other hand, throughout its initial decades of independence avoided submission and dependence on Washington. It maintained close relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was a founder and leading member of the so-called "non-aligned movement." In recent years India’s capitalist economy—while still fettered by pre-capitalist relations in the countryside and unequal trade relations with the developed imperialist centers—has taken off. Its yearly economic output will soon surpass France and Germany. With the end of the Cold War, the decline of the traditionally ruling Congress Party and the rise of rightist "Hindu nationalist" forces, India has moved closer to Washington. Currently, nearly twenty percent of India’s exports and ten percent of its imports are with the United States.—I.N.]

The radicalization has been fueled by a growing rage over the appalling human cost of UN sanctions against Iraq and the daily images of Israeli brutality and occupation against the Palestinian people. Wrapping its anti-imperialist demagogy in an absolutist religious cloak, al-Qaeda taps into the despair and demoralization that a radicalization without revolutionary proletarian political leadership inevitably produces.

Despite its presentation in religious mystification and demagogy, bin Laden’s appeal is political and secular. He trumpets these concrete political questions that resonate with broad masses of different social classes.

A Product of Imperialism

Bin Laden’s assumption of the mantle of struggle against the imperialist "infidels" is belied by his history as a capitalist businessman and an agent of imperialism. His political biography begins as a central financial and military figure in the massive U.S.-armed and organized campaign, directed by the CIA, against the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Bin Laden has been in conflict with his former U.S. patrons since the 1990-91 Gulf War. Today Washington is proceeding to obliterate its former client and ally.

This later rupturing of his alliance with Washington and the Saudi royal family was in no way the result of a progressive turn toward the self-organization of the toiling masses on the part of bin Laden and his organization.

Only such mass mobilization by working people can lead to the establishment of popular revolutionary governments. And only such governments, issuing out of national-democratic revolutions can carry out the land reform, industrial development, and democratic participation that can force the withdrawal of imperialist military presence in the region and conquer genuine national independence and sovereignty. Such a revolutionary process would link up the Arab and Islamic masses with the workers and farmers around the globe who are fighting imperialism and capitalism, including within the imperialist centers.

The activity of al Qaeda and allied groups in Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, Somalia, and Afghanistan shows an exact opposite course. After his fallout with the Saudi ruling family during the Gulf War, bin Laden established himself in the Sudan where he formed an alliance with the reactionary military regime of General Omar Bashir. In Sudan, bin Laden set up various businesses which generated income to finance his political and "military" activities. These included fighting the progressive, anti-imperialist, and secular regime in South Yemen.

Isolated terrorist actions, based on narrow religious dogmas—the sine qua non of al Qaeda—point in the exact opposite direction. While claiming to be aimed at forcing imperialism out of the Middle East, they actually facilitate and reinforce the imperialist presence. They drive working people away from politics and class struggle, reducing them to spectators. They provide the pretext for repression and the closing up of political space.

The effect of al Qaeda activity has been to strengthen imperialism and create new obstacles to effective anti-imperialist struggle. That a figure like bin Laden would emerge out of the vacuum registers the overwhelming crisis of leadership in the Arab and Islamic world.

Iranian Revolution

Since the mighty mass revolutionary upsurge—one of the largest, sustained insurrectionary uprisings in world history—which threw the imperialist stooge Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi off his "Peacock Throne" in Iran, the oppressed masses of the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia have suffered crushing blows.

The new Islamic Republic of Iran, under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in the heady post-Shah revolutionary atmosphere, carried out a series of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist measures. A number of industries were nationalized. The rights of indigenous workers organizations, which became widespread and decisive to the victory of the anti-Shah insurrection, were recognized. The close relations the Shah had fostered with Israel and apartheid South Africa were severed. Top secret, reactionary treaties which the Shah’s regime had entered into with other U.S.-client regimes in the region were torn up.

When militant students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran as a "den of spies" following Washington’s refusal to extradite the exile shah, the regime sanctioned the publication of secret U.S. diplomatic papers documenting decades of gross U.S. interference in Iranian politics. The CIA had organized a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, and the decades since then had seen close collaboration with the notorious torturers and murderers of the SAVAK secret police. However, the refusal of the students and the Khomeini regime to release U.S. diplomatic personnel, held as hostages for nearly a year, gave Washington an opening to sever relations, rally U.S. bourgeois public opinion, and begin a counteroffensive.

Despite a progressive thrust in its domestic and foreign policies, the Khomeini regime remained committed to capitalist property relations. Encroachments on the bulwarks of the traditional capitalist state, while significant, were limited. There was severe repression against many of its secular, left-wing opponents—who themselves committed serious blunders—as well as independent working-class organizations that initially flourished, and the rights of Iran’s non-Persian oppressed nationalities. While masses of women benefited from the regime’s initial social and education policies, which were a huge advance over the rampant social inequality enforced under the shah, religiously motivated restrictions on women’s civil and human rights were implemented.

Defeat Deepens the Crisis of Leadership

Washington, London, and Paris, stinging from the loss of their decades-long reliable client in the Shah, immediately organized a counter-assault via the reactionary regime of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The resultant ten-year Iran-Iraq war led to one million deaths. While the Iraqi invaders were beaten back and unsuccessful in overturning the post-Shah regime in Iran, the war stunted Iran’s revolutionary potential and strengthened capitalist forces internally. It also bolstered reactionary regimes in the surrounding area such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

In 1977 Pakistani working people suffered a crushing blow when Washington backed the installation of a vicious "Islamic" military dictatorship under Zia ul-Haq. The December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, also galvanized reactionary regimes in the region, under CIA funding and direction, in a pan-Islamic "jihad."

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon in a brutal war that killed 20,000 civilians and took the Zionist army to the outskirts of Beirut. Pressure from Washington, along with massive anti-war demonstrations inside Israel, forced an Israeli withdrawal to a southern enclave, but the price was huge for the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was based in that country. The PLO leadership and cadre were forced to flee en masse to Tunisia. Thousands of Palestinian refugees were massacred in the Sabra and Shatila camps. [The Palestinians had been considerably weakened by Syria’s intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1974-75 which prevented a decisive victory of the progressive Lebanese and Palestinian forces which were arrayed against the rightist Phalangist movement—I.N.]

This laid the basis for the political degeneration and bourgeoisification of the PLO. Following the Gulf War and the Arafat leadership’s disastrous policy of siding with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Washington was able to impose on a now acquiescent PLO the Oslo "peace process" which became a tortuous trap for the Palestinian people.

Along with the political regression of the PLO, there were two other broad historical factors which have deepened the vacuum of leadership for the oppressed and exploited masses in Central Asia, South Asia, and the Arab Middle East.

First was the clear exhaustion and failure of "secular" bourgeois nationalism in the Arab world. This became a more profound fact since the demise of the tendency personified by former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Repressive regimes, such as Hafez al-Asad’s Syria, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Algeria, and Egypt carry on the tradition but have no perspective for struggling against imperialism, to which they ultimately orient. "Secular" regimes such as the Shah’s Iran or Iraq under Saddam Hussein were brutal capitalist regimes and imperialist clients. Pan-Arab demagogy proved hollow and invariably capitulated before imperialist divide-and-conquer tactics.

Second, and decisive, is the past role of counterfeit Marxism, that is Stalinism of a pro-Moscow or pro-Beijing variant, in betraying, disorienting, and demoralizing promising struggles. In Iran, the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party played a central role in the betrayal of the independent revolutionary republic of Azerbeijan in the period following the end of World War II. In Indonesia, the pro-Beijing Indonesian Communist Party, under the direction of China’s diplomatic ties to the Sukarno regime, were unprepared and disarmed by the 1965 CIA-directed military coup of Suharto. They were decimated in the blood purges that killed up to one million workers and peasants which followed the overthrow of Sukarno. Pro-Beijing Pakistani Stalinist groups were disoriented and discredited when China supported Zia ul-haq’s military dictatorship there. Moscow’s friendly ties to the shah’s regime further sidelined the Tudeh party and discredited Marxism during the 1979 revolution. Various Stalinist parties in the Arab world were similarly marginalized by their political subordination to the diplomacy of Moscow. Moscow enjoyed close relations with regimes in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, which ruthlessly repressed pro-Moscow Communist Parties.

The political bankruptcy and exhaustion of secular bourgeois nationalism and Stalinism along with the political degeneration of the PLO set in place conditions for a conjunctural ascendancy—as if by default— of Islamist ideology and organizations of a generally rightist character to fill the political vacuum. [In Israel, the Hamas organization was initially cultivated and fostered by the Israel state in the late 1970s, giving it rare legal status in the occupied territories.—I.N.]

Washington and bin Laden

Acknowledgement of Washington’s past alliance with bin Laden is not uncommon in the big-business press, but such references are terse and underplayed. An article in the September 15 Financial Times called him an "accidental creation of the US and the Saudi government." In an October 7 New York Times piece posing "questions and answers", answered its question "What was the American role in the rise of Osama bin Laden?" this way: "Osama bin Laden…traveled to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to join the jihad, or holy war, against the Soviet occupation of that country. The Afghan rebels were armed and financed by the United States and the Saudi government. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Pakistani intelligence service arranged delivery of supplies…" Writing in

the November 12, 2001 New Yorker ("The House of Bin Laden"), Jane Mayer parses her words, "[Bin Laden] threw himself into providing financial, organizational, and engineering aid to the mujahadeen, who were also heavily funded by the United States." The CIA is very sensitive on the subject. An unusual public statement sent to The Nation magazine, which had run an article on bin Laden’s links to it, signed by William R. Harlow, Director of Public Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency stated, "For the record, your readers should know that the CIA never employed, paid or maintained any relationship whatsoever with bin Laden." Such blatant lying is stunning, even from an apparatus where the organization of disinformation and deceit is central to its existence.

In recent statements Bin Laden has also downplayed his partnership with the U.S. government. In fact, the connection was substantial. Now that they are blood enemies, Washington and its terrorist offspring have a mutual interest in degrading their former alliance.

However, in one 1995 interview with Agence France Presse cited in the best-selling book Taliban by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, bin Laden said, "To counter these atheist Russians, the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan. I settled in Pakistan in the Afghan border region. There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi Kingdom and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis."

Bin Laden was one of 52 children of a polygamous Yemeni-Saudi businessman who built a huge fortune through the securing of construction contracts with the Saudi ruling royal family and is a leading capitalist family in Saudi Arabia today. The Saudi Binladen Group, listed on world stock exchanges and prominent in many U.S. business ventures and "philanthropies," has today $5 billion in assets and a reported 35,000 employees worldwide. [The Bin Laden family has close ties to top U.S. financial institutions and ruling-class figures. See previously cited Jane Mayer article in New Yorker.—I.N.]

Stalinism and Imperialism in Afghanistan

At the end of 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up a murderously faction-ridden, crumbling Stalinist regime, which had squandered a promising political opportunity to transform Afghan society in a progressive manner. The Soviet invasion only made a bad situation worse.

A brutal war and occupation strengthened the reactionary tribal and landlord forces that had already been receiving covert aid from Saudi, Pakistani, and U.S. intelligence services in opposing land reform, women’s rights, and other progressive measures that were the program of the Afghan government of Nur Mohammed Taraki. The problem was that these vital reforms were bureaucratically proclaimed and imposed devoid of any mass, democratic mobilization and self-organization of the Afghan workers and landless peasants. The mass support and enthusiasm that greeted the left-wing coup of April 1978 that put the Stalinist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in power was alienated and squandered. Murderous power feuds broke out between PDPA factions. Taraki was murdered by his successor Hafizullah Amin, who was himself murdered by the invading Soviets who placed another faction leader Babrak Karmal in power. Such factional madness and the apparent loss of the country’s sovereignty played into the hands of the semi-feudal tribal chiefs and Islamic hierarchy, who were also often the largest landowners. Their historically dwindling social weight and class political power was reinforced internally and given military weight through the support of Washington and its regional lackeys in Islamabad and Riyadh.

Bin Laden became a central figure in the massive campaign against the Soviet forces, at the pinnacle of which was the largest CIA covert operation in history, based in Pakistan, funded to the tune of nearly $4 billion.

Bin Laden was recruited by Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service to head the Saudi contingent of the thousands of Muslims recruited to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. A triangle of bin Laden, Prince Turki, and the previously noted General Hamid Gul, the head of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), became the central mechanism for the entire CIA-directed covert operation.

From his position high in Saudi ruling circles, bin Laden raised funds from fellow millionaires and billionaires in the parasitic Persian Gulf monarchies. According to a November-December 1999 article in the prestigious imperialist journal Foreign Affairs, "With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992." Bin Laden’s funds helped pay for this recruitment and training of the so-called "Arab Afghans." Bin Laden also brought to Afghanistan heavy equipment from his family’s construction company, building roads and tunnels, military camps, cave complexes, and munitions depots.

By 1984 bin Laden was operating out of the Pakistani city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border. Peshawar was a center of the CIA-directed mujahadeen resistance to the Soviet army and the Afghan government. In 1985 President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166 stepping up covert military aid to the mujahadeen and arms supplies dramatically increased to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, according to a 1992 Washington Post article. The same article speaks of a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists shuttling to ISI’s center of covert operations in Rawalpindi, Pakistan to plan military operations in Afghanistan.

The "Afghan Arab" forces centered around bin Laden were funneled hundreds of thousands of tons of armaments and money by the CIA, through the group bin Laden formed called Makhtab al Khadimat, which became al-Qaeda. The ISI under the policy of the U.S.-supported military dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq was the conduit of CIA aid and training and Pakistan was the physical base of the mujahadeen forces. The huge CIA operation in Pakistan transformed the ISI into a massive, particularly vicious, adjunct to the brutal "Islamic" military regime with a total staff estimated at 150,000 officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents, and informers.

Who Will Defeat Terrorism?

The September 11 "action" was antithetical to any progressive political framework, struggle, or content.

We can compare the al Qaeda terrorist organization with a genuine liberation movement like that of the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. For a decade, successive Democratic and Republican administrations waged a truly genocidal war in Vietnam. Through carpet bombing, on-the-ground massacres, chemical and biological warfare, and CIA urban death squads of "Operation Phoenix," some 3 million civilians died. Did the Vietnamese liberation forces send agents into the U.S. to kill civilians, which was certainly within their capability? They could even have found not a few U.S. anti-war activists driven to a frenzy by the daily carnage to carry out such deeds. [A tiny layer of anti-war activists—out of the breakup of the Students for a Democratic society—did embark on a caricature of a terrorist campaign, often goaded by government agents provocateurs. Although never consciously targeting civilians, groups like the Weather Underground played right into the hands of the government, but, fortunately, the mass anti-war movement was too deeply rooted, powerful, and well-led, to be derailed.—I.N.] On the contrary the Vietnamese encouraged the peaceful, mass movement against the war—perhaps the largest people’s movement in U.S. history—by the American people, which eventually became a decisive complement to the unceasing, heroic struggle of the Vietnamese workers and peasants, and forced the imperialist murderers out.

The methods of terrorists like al Qaeda and others who falsely claim to speak for the oppressed in reality echo the practice of imperialism itself, in its political inability to distinguish between peoples and governments. As U.S. Socialist Workers Party leader Jack Barnes put in an article from the October 22 Militant newspaper, "It is class-conscious workers and fighters for national liberation who draw a hard-and-fast distinction between the killing of innocent civilians and the deaths of soldiers in combat."

Such methods echo that of imperialism with its indifference to what the euphemists at the Pentagon call "collateral damage", i.e. civilian slaughter, in the service of its policies. We should recall not only the carpet bombing of Vietnam by the U.S., but the Nazi bombings of civilians in Spain, Rotterdam, London, and Stalingrad; the Japanese bombing and massacres in Nanking and other Chinese cities; the British and U.S. horrific destruction of Dresden and indiscriminate bombings of working-class suburbs in Germany during World War II that had absolutely no military or strategic value; and of course, the atom bombing by the liberal Democratic Truman Administration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The ethics and discipline of genuine revolutionary fighters against oppression who are engaged in armed struggles is the opposite. The model here is the practice of the Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara whose guerrilla watchword was "Never harm a civilian." The policy of the July 26^th Movement guerrillas was to release unharmed captured enemy soldiers, after disarming them and delivering a political "class." Guerrillas who mistreated soldiers or took items from peasants or shopkeepers were severely punished. Rape was punished by execution.

The terrorist organizations that have become prominent and are linked to the al-Quaeda organization were trained, armed, and organized by the CIA. The Pakistani and Saudi regimes that propped up the Taliban regime are both longtime client regimes of U.S. imperialism, whose very existence as reactionary semi-feudal landlord-run religious states is inconceivable without the decisive historical backing of Washington.

All terrorism is premised, mistakenly, on the hope that such acts will inspire and galvanize mass action when, in fact, the opposite is the case. The September 11 attack, by indiscriminately targeting civilians and bystanders, was not a military operation. It was not an expression of guerrilla tactics. It was not even classic political terrorism, which aims its isolated violence at targeted individual representatives of repressive regimes and is, more or less, sensitive to civilian casualties.

Terrorism in the name of the oppressed and exploited peoples and classes (as opposed to the state and paramilitary terrorism of the ruling classes) is always and everywhere the expression of despair and political weakness. It registers defeat and retreat.

Imperialism will never "defeat" terrorism, and, in fact, much prefers it to its revolutionary and socialist alternative. Terrorism can only be undermined and eliminated when the mass movement of the oppressed and exploited takes center stage. Terrorism can only be defeated as a byproduct of intelligently and effectively fighting and defeating oppression and imperialist exploitation.

Today’s unfolding U.S. war drive is accelerating events. It’s stormy, destabilizing dynamic—concentrating all the unresolved contradictions of the past two decades—is creating new conditions that will propel progressive mass struggles that will fill the political vacuum in the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia region, and effectively confront and weaken the imperialist stranglehold and obstacle to political, social, and economic development

A new generation will increasingly shed the wretched legacy and political baggage of defeat and retreat. The next wave of struggle will have nothing in common with the dead end methods and reactionary ideology of bin Ladenism. Far from being the face of the coming period, Bin Ladenism is the death agony of an historical period that is ending.

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