The Washington Post reports that the War on Terror is over. No armistice has been announced. No treaty has been signed. The whole thing is just being dropped quietly, like a burnt-out cigarette. Too bad. It was our favorite war.
In the few words that follow, we explain why. First, the background:
"The history of the world is but the biography of great men," was Thomas Carlyle's contribution to the genre. But here we are more of the 'cometh the hour, cometh the man' school of history. When something needs doing...there is always some clown dim enough to do it. Osama bin Laden was that man.
"Bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," was what he was up to, he said in a videotape. He even did the math. "Every dollar spent by al-Qaida in attacking the US has cost Washington $1m (£545,000) in economic fallout and military spending," said the report.
"We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russia for 10 years, [in Afghanistan] until it went bankrupt... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."
How many generations will still tell of bin Laden's triumph? He brought down not just one empire, but two. His band of terrorists leeched the Soviets so thoroughly, they fainted. It was no coincidence that the Soviets lost Afghanistan in the same year their empire disintegrated. Then, he delivered a challenge to the America's amour propre.
--Bill Bonner
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