Everyone has heard to old saying: the more things change, the more they get worse: here’s to trolling through the incredible Economic Undertow archives, May 2d, 2011:

BIN LADEN IS DEAD

Body Buried At Sea After Raid in Pakistan

 

(New York Times) The news touched off an extraordinary outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at the Ground Zero site, waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.!” In New York City, crowds sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Throughout downtown Washington, drivers honked horns deep into the night.

“For over two decades, Bin Laden has been Al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement televised around the world. “The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

Fast forward to 2019, nobody is cheering:

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS Leader Known for His Brutality Durability, Is Dead at 48.

President Trump announced the death of al-Baghdadi, who transformed the Islamic State into a global terrorist network that conquered territory the size of Britain and directed horrific attacks in the West.

Top Secret US Army photograph of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi taken the instant before he blew himself up with a hand grenade like the mad dog he was!

A great day for capitalism, right? Baghdadi has conveniently reduced himself into pieces too small to identify. Nobody has to bother with dumping his granulated butt into the ocean, or identifying him in a post-mortem or lying about it, afterward.

Oops, wrong about that:

Baghdadi’s remains have been buried at sea, officials say

Barbara Starr (CNN)

The remains of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have been buried at sea, according to two US defense officials.

On Sunday, White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he expected the US to follow the same protocol as al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who was killed in a 2011 raid in Pakistan by US Navy SEALs and buried at sea.

Appearing on MTP, O’Brien said Baghdadi’s “body will be disposed of properly.” Asked if the US would follow the same protocol as bin Laden, O’Brien said, “I would expect that to be the case.”

Good grief! What was it Marx wrote? “Historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice: the first time as farce, the second time as an even more stupendous farce.” This looks to veer into a weeping Jordan Internet meme. Without evidence, how does anyone know if it’s Baghdadi or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Osama bin-Laden or some random joker off the street? We can’t know; we have to take the word of the same thieves who endlessly lie to everyone about everything. It’s a kind of dumbshow that people keep falling for. Step One, create cartoon villain. Step Two, make villain disappear as if by magic. Step Three, create a replacement villain. It’s like an episode of South Park.

2011:

The same government that has been telling anyone who would listen that the recession is dead tells us now that Elvis the Pop Art caricature-of-evil, the ‘Caliph of Terror’ is also deceased.

Right on cue, normally cynical New Yorkers swallow this self- serving nonsense like candy, “waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, ‘U.S.A., U.S.A.!’”. This has to be bullish for commodities, with Brent crude marked @ $126 (!) per barrel. Osama is conveniently dead just when the president is busy converting the repulsive Donald Trump, a hairpiece in search of a dead cat to have sex with into a respectable GOP presidential candidate.

Trump would be a president able to endow the truly departed Ferdinand Marcos with ‘class’.

As with Zarqawi and bin-Laden, al-Baghdadi turns up dead when it is spectacularly convenient. In 2011, president Obama had just lost the House of Representatives to the Republicans. He was seen as being weak on terrorism. The ‘Arab Spring’ had just begun: the Obama presidency was in need of a boost. Whoops! Here comes Dead Osama like a party bus.

In 2019, the farcical Trump is looking forward to being removed from office with prosecutors up and down the East Coast lining up to take shots at him. Unable to find Alabama or Colorado on a map or win an election without help from Ukrainian gangsters, the hairpiece in search of teenage girls desperately needs a public distraction.

What of Baghdadi? There never appeared enough to him to found a country, even with his presumed Islamic bona fides. Baghdadi’s strategic dilemma emerged during his moment of triumph in 2014: the chance to keep pursuing defeated Iraqis vs. the need for more manpower to gain by brute force the territory outside his narrow Sunni Muslim base in northern Syria and Iraq. Forgoing the necessary forces would risk an unequal battle Islamic State might lose. Gaining more manpower would require time and cost the group momentum. The time would be used by the Iraqi government to regroup and obtain US air support; it would become stronger more quickly than any non-state such as Baghdadi’s. In Syria, the same manpower constraints would limit Baghdadi’s group to territory already conceded by the Assad government due to their own manpower problems. It was the choice to attract the thousands of additional fighters which led to the founding of the caliphate.

This presented its own dilemmas. Baghdadi’s sole means of support would be Turkey rather than Turkey AND a bunch of other Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia. Turkey could- and did offer logistics and intelligence; it provided a pathway for fighters and a market for stolen goods. However, any overt material or military support would be out of the question. Turkey was an American ally which had to at the very least, be able to deny supporting terror gangs (other than those approved by Washington). There were also strings attached. Turkey expected ISIS to pursue Turkish priorities rather than its own: to gain oil resources and destroy the Kurds in areas outside the reach of Ankara. After fighting the battles, Turkey would take any prizes from ISIS, which was expendable. In a sense, Baghdadi’s ambitions were in a race with the Turks’: could ISIS become strong enough, quickly enough to put its own agenda ahead of its parent, to sever ties then survive? By announcing his caliphate, Baghdadi was declaring some degree of independence from its primary source of support.

The Saudis could offer far more in the way of funds and material and do so overtly without caring about the Americans. US was in many ways a Saudi client that shared Riyadh’s interests, not the other way around. On the surface, the two Sunni Muslim enterprises appeared to be natural allies, each striving to be more fundamental than the other; both of them sharing enmity for Iran and its Middle Eastern puppets. Yet, Baghdadi’s caliphate was seen in Riyadh as a direct challenge to the religious authority of the House of Saud. Baghdadi was denounced as a heretic, his caliphate as blasphemy. Saudi- and other support would flow to so-called ‘moderate’ jihadis operating in Syria, gangs who knew their place such as al-Qaeda, Nusra Front, etc … all with CIA blessing.

Confronted with these various dilemmas, Baghdadi wound up doing little bits of everything at the same time. His caliphate attracted thousands of international jihadi wannabes, many of whom were useful only as suicide bombers (or cooks and bookkeepers it turns out). The rest were criminals looking to pillage or for a chance at murder and mayhem. None of these were the stuff of a new nation or even a decent army. Baghdadi carried on his offensive, but did so in all directions. For a short period in 2014 it looked as if ISIS would sweep away the Iraqi government, chase them and their Iranian partners all the way to Basra. The capital’s defenders were the depleted survivors of units that had been routed out of Mosul in disarray. The only addition to the government side was a call up of Shia militias under Muqtada al-Sadr and Ali al-Sistani. Though this group was great in numbers, they amounted to little more than a poorly armed mob; untrained, unsupported, with nothing in the way of heavy weapons. In the summer of 2014, ISIS controlled the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi to the west. A feint from these places, even with small forces toward the Shia holy cities of Karballa and Najaf would have drawn off the Sistani-Sadr forces from the capital and left the road to the Persian Gulf — and Iraq’s massive oil reserves — more or less completely open.

After Mosul, the Iraqi government was in chaos, the US was arguing whether to support Maliki or not, to bring in air- or ground assets or to wait and see. Meanwhile, the Iraqi Kurds had quietly taken over Kirkuk and its neighboring oil fields. If time and place were to offer the ISIS the opportunity for success, this was it. Instead of daring to strike hard into the vacuum like a latter-day Rommel, Baghdadi, who never led any of his operations from the front, dithered and his moment passed. In Iraq, Baghdadi placed Baiji, a dusty refinery town with no strategic value under siege. He likewise invested Dier Ezzor, a medium-sized town several hundred miles away from anywhere important in Syria. He turned his forces away from Baghdad and attacked the harmless Yazidis then assaulted the Kurds in Kobani, where he suffered his fatal defeat. His loss of Manbij, also to the Kurds, cut his supply lines from Turkey. Ultimately, he frittered his command along with almost of those in it. As a leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was a disaster wrapped in a catastrophe.

Bin-Laden worked for the Americans in Afghanistan against the Soviets before he turned on his masters and made himself the poster child for Islamic militancy. After years of repeated failure on its own terms, it is hard to see how useful Islamic militancy is going to be going forward; it has nothing creative to offer, it is just another kind of violent mafia. Baghdadi spent four years in an Iraqi prison camp run by the Americans, the particulars of both his internment and his release are murky. That he had business with the Turkish regime is clear but as for his working for Uncle Sam, it is impossible to say. Who he really was as a human person is unknown.

Industrial culture is good at offering narrative myths as loss-leaders; a stringing together of simple, easy to remember falsities. It’s called marketing, it’s a multi-billion dollar business. Industry is helpless with character which cannot be bought or sold, which requires something more than lies. Agents of modernity like Baghdadi and the other mass killers here and abroad are the angels of our self-created media paradise, they are types, not men, lines drawn around nothing in particular, voids programmed to follow some inscrutable internal gravity, to roll wherever and knock things over without care or purpose. Baghdadi was a ‘Man For Our Times’, the Caliph of Nothing, another over-priced consumer product, something to be used once or twice then thrown away; perhaps the best of modernity’s offerings: monsters and non-men. What are the worst? We probably won’t like finding out.

More on ISIS and Iraq, here: Sharia For Sale