Written by Thomas Magstadt   

On the day before September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden was an obscure figure, a nobody on the world stage. But for the arrogance, ignorance, and ineptitude of our leaders, he still would be.

The tenth anniversary of 9/11, a national day of remembrance and mourning, was regrettably also an occasion for media hype, commercial exploitation, and red-hot, self-serving, pseudo-patriotic rhetoric – the very kind of arrogant, polarizing, provocative, bring-it-on political trash talk that has become the coin of the realm in America's sprawling secret government-within-a-government.

This new Homeland Security State is built upon the preexisting National Security State created after 1948 in response to the perceived Communist threat to freedom and democracy and the phoenix-like postwar rise of the "totalitarian" Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. But the military build-up in the 1950s did not break the federal piggy bank. Today, the United States is saddled with a massive federal debt, mired in two wars we can neither stop nor win, and weakened by an anemic economy rooted in deep structural problems. Meanwhile, our damaged leaders dither.

How did we go from superpower to giant-with-feet-of-clay so quickly? Who or what is to blame?

In 1943, the late Sidney Hook wrote a book entitled the Hero in History. Hook's mentor was William James, the great pragmatist who was instrumental in changing the way generations of scholars and policy-makers think about the world. Though an avowed Marxist in his early career, Hook was to become one of America's leading anti-Communist intellectuals.

A hero in Hook's paradigm is a "great man or woman in history...of whom we can say...that if they had not lived when they did, or acted as they did, the history of their countries and of the world...would have been profoundly different." Hook divided the great men and women in history – "heroes" by his definition – into two categories, those who were event-made and those who made events. The first applies to the majority of history's most famous personalities from Alexander the Great to Napoleon and Abe Lincoln.

As for the second category – history's event-makers – Hook himself had difficulty finding any figure who did more than ride a wave, who actually turned the tide of history. He made a good case for Lenin as an event-maker, arguing that without Lenin there would have been no October Revolution. By Hook's reckoning, Lenin changed the trajectory of Russian history, and in so doing changed world history.

Are any other historical figures about whom the same can be said? The founders of the world's great religions – Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed, the Buddha – spring readily to mind. What about conquerors like Alexander the Great or Napoleon? Possibly, but Alexander died on the eve of his 33rd birthday and although he never lost a battle and his conquests spanned most of the known world the Alexandrian empire was short-lived. And Napoleon had no hand in bringing about the French Revolution that preceded – and prepared the way for – his rise to power.

My candidate for the event-maker of the 21st century – an individual who ranks with Lenin and few if any others in modern world history – is Osama bin Laden. Notice that I can't bring myself to use the word "hero" in the same sentence or even to call OBL a "great man" (for the same reason that I can't apply either of those two terms to, say, Adolf Hitler). Nonetheless, who can deny that Osama bin Laden changed Washington and the world – and not in a good way.

Still, his bin Laden's would have failed utterly as an event-maker had it not been for the timing of 9/11, a stroke of extraordinary luck, coming as it did in the aftermath of a cliffhanger election that was decided in a 5-4 ruling by the US Supreme Court (Bush v. Gore), rather than the voters.
The result of that vote, in a nutshell (literally), was to make George W. Bush the Commander in Chief of the world largest military establishment and put the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Paul Wolfowitz in charge of telling the clueless "Decider" what to decide.

We all know the rest of the story, which can be summed up in three little words – war on terror. A decade later, the number of coalition deaths in Afghanistan stood 2,649 (September 18, 2011). Of those, 1,701 were Americans, by far the largest number among the coalition partners. In Iraq, the latest Pentagon figures place the death toll for US at 4,475. The total for these two wars has gone well over 7,000 and that's only for US fatalities – coalition partners' fatalities take the totals considerably higher. Estimates of civilian fatalities run into hundreds of thousands.

The cost of the war on terror in dollars and cents is unknowable. Experts differ on what to count and the government deliberately fudges the numbers in all kinds of ways. In July 2010, CNN reported that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had exceeded $1 trillion. One study concluded that the war on terror will cost at $3.7 trillion when all is said and done but cautioned that the cost could go as high as $4.4 trillion. By comparison, World War II cost $4.1 trillion (in current dollars)

Nor can all costs be measured in statistics. Consider the loss of liberty and privacy in our daily lives, of public confidence in government and the economy, and of respect for America – both as a country and as an ideal – around the world. The soft power we once had has all been squandered as a direct result of substituting hard power for smart politics, statesmanship, and diplomacy.

The United States has already lost the war on terror, no matter what happens from here on out. Thanks to a tragic failure of leadership, Osama bin Laden has won it.

Meanwhile, his power over our lives continues beyond the grave.


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