Enemy Number One of the US government. Like many before him - Saddam Hussein, Muamar Gadafi, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende and countless others - bin Laden has now become the focus of a concerted US military and propaganda campaign, in the course of which innocent bystanders and the truth will both be slaughtered.
Why is this happening?
The overwhelming reason is the relation between US domestic and foreign policy; the need to define and assert US interests against both other states and the US working class. 'Enemies', whether states or organisations, are those who threaten the ability of imperialism to exploit the world. In the words of Gore Vidal, "A constant stream of 'enemies' is the only justification for a half-century of military procurement; $5.5 trillion thus far".
This role was filled for a long period by the USSR and its allies, which represented not only a credible military threat, but also the possibility, however deformed, of a different social and economic system.
With the demise of the Soviet bloc and the US victory in the cold war, there has been a search for the new enemy. A long procession of adventures - Grenada, Somalia, Iran, the Gulf War - has finally led to the ideal figure of fear and hate - the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist.
A Ithough the bloodiest terrorist attack on the US has been by the domestic ultra-right ain Oklahoma, the "enemy within" is not suitable for this purpose.
Isiam, nowever. suits admirably. The Muslim world is littered with reactionary and repressive governments, many of them installed and supported by the United States.
Popular struggles against these regimes are increasingly turning to Islam as an alternative system of government due to the failure of bourgeois nationalism and the lack of a credible socialist alternative.
During the cold war, the US and the repressive regimes built up many Islamist movements as a winter to secular left wing or =alist movements. In :s:an. in particular, the Muahadin groups were rained by the US, om Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as a proxy in its against the Soviet-backed Karmal and Najibullah regimes.
Osama bin Laden, who had inherited a fortune from his father's construction business in Saudi Arabia, was one of the thousands of recruits from across the Muslim world who flocked to this cause. G uerrillas who received their training in Afghanistan are now prominent many Islamist struggles. As well as forming the core of the Afghan Taliban, they are fighting in Algeria, Chechnya, Palestine, the Philippines, Egypt, Turkey, Kashmir and elsewhere.
Several of these "Afghanis" fought in Bosnia, though their role was not as influential as in other areas, and there have been recent reports of bin Laden supporters being arrested in Albania.
These conflicts also demonwhy the Islamic movements are able to attract popular support. As bin Laden said in a recent interview on CNN:
"With a simple look at the U.S. behaviour, we find that it judges the behaviour of the poor Palestinian children whose country was occupied: if they throw stones against the Israeli occupation, it says they are terrorists whereas when the Israeli pilots bombed the United Nations building in Qana, Lebanon while was full of children and women, the US stopped any plan to condemn Israel.
"At the time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the highest top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader (Gerry Adams), while woe, all woe is the Muslims if they cry out for their rights. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world". In Bosnia, in Kosova, in Kashmir, the US can be seen to condone, if not actually promote, genocide against Muslims. Meanwhile, Israel is permitted to expand its settlements and flout even the minimal concessions of the grossly unfair Oslo agreement, while Arafat builds up his repressive Palestinian regime with Israeli and western support. There is no shortage of situations where western hypocrisy can be exposed.
Having originally fostered bin Laden, the US has now turned him into a hero. Many Muslims who, like ourselves, rejected with