Bin Laden's Funniest Home Videos

May 10, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Pseudo-comedian Bob Saget never had a better narrative to work with:

Bob: Okay, here’s Osama at home.  He’s going for the remote.  What’s that he’s saying to one of his sixty-seven kids? 

Bob as Osama, Sr.: Step out of the way.  I cannot see the images of myself with you in the way. 

Bob as Osama, Jr.: Daddy hug!  Daddy hug!

Bob as Osama, Sr.: No Daddy hug, you unholy spawn of an indolent wife. 

Osama, Jr.: Daddy hug!

Osama, Sr.: Take this, you whoreson!   (Bob makes gunshot sound)

Osama, Jr.: (Gasping, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth) I love you, Daddy! (Osama, Jr. dies).

Osama, Sr.: Someone come take this garbage away immediately!

(Five young women dressed in I Dream of Jeanie get ups scurry into the room, scoop up Junior and exit, wailing.)

Bob slash Osama, Sr.: And stop that infernal racket, you disgusting houris.  I have to concentrate!

(Osama views videos of himself while Saget provides the internal monologue)

Osama, Sr:  Yes, I can destroy the infidels in a holy global jihad.  I am good enough, I am smart enough, and doggone it, people predisposed to martyrdom like me!

The bin Laden home video hysteria was but one piece of the demonization campaign revived by the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants upon their target’s demise.  Labeling an enemy as “evil” is a powerful propaganda weapon that most often turns back on you like a runaway torpedo.  Invoking “evil,” like subscribing to any other intangible, leads to muddled, superstitious thinking, and that inevitably leads to defeat. 

"My fellow jihadists..."

Lamentably, in contemporary America, even the supposedly sharpest, most skeptical minds in the public for a have fallen into this trap.  John Stewart of The Daily Show has taken to calling bin Laden “the world’s most evil man,” and it doesn’t sound to me like he’s kidding when he says that sort of thing.  Firebrand Maureen Dowd lapsed into mouth-breathing insentience with a May 7 ditz diatribe titled “Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil” in which she justified the killing of bin Laden by characterizing the al Qaeda leader as a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.

Neither Mo Dowd nor anyone else needs to justify killing bin Laden.  But calling him evil because he killed thousands of Americans with a shoestring operation that should have been stopped by our law enforcement agencies long before any hijackers boarded an airplane is a masterpiece of rationalistic moralizing. 

Bin Laden is responsible for the death of thousands all right, but he did so with a new twist on an old, old tactic called an “air raid” as the first strike of a war that he openly declared a good five years before Sept. 11, 2001.  The last time we bothered to actually declare war before we attacked was in 1941.

Those “thousands” of Americans he killed as part of an act of declared war seem like a paltry casualty count compared to the tens and probably hundreds of thousands of innocents we have killed and maimed and the untold millions of lives we have destroyed since we had him pinned down at Tora Bora in Dec. 2001 (we only let him get away out of kindness, I suppose).  Killing him finally, after nearly a decade doesn’t redeem the swath of destruction we created between then and now.

And calling him “evil” carries no more or less moral weight than he and his followers and the rest of the world that wishes we’d take a flying tackle at a rolling donut calling us “the great Satan.”  In war, no matter whose side you’re on, you’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, and God loves you and He hates them to pieces like meeces.  Adolph Hitler believed God was on his side, as did Benito Mussolini.  The Japanese believed that God was on their side because, heck, they believed their emperor was God, so who else’s side would God be on? (Heh!)

We killed a lot of Japanese and German civilians from the air in World War II, most notably at Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Dresden.  Many argue that the A-bomb attacks on Japan were necessary, but in truth they were only necessary to terminate the war with an unconditional surrender.  If we had offered the Japanese surrender on the terms we would up giving them anyway, they likely would have cut the bushido and thrown their hands up.   Apologists for the annihilation of Dresden note that the city was a vital German military and an economic target.  So…what kinds of targets were the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers? 

Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is, in my considered opinion, humanity’s all-time greatest military and political mastermind.  With no navy or air force or army or even a defense budget he has managed to entangle the best-trained, best-equipped ever military of history’s mightiest nation in a self-defeating war that it can never win. 

And it’s a war that we’ll never stop until we can somehow grow out of the asinine notion that name-calling makes for sound strategy. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.