Paying the bin Laden tax By Tom Engelhardt

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/OB08Dj01.html

***SNIP

Maybe it's time to face the facts: this isn't your grandfather's America. Once, prospective Americans landed in a New World. This time around, a new world's landed on us.

Making fantasy into reality
Bin Laden, of course, is long dead, but his was the 9/11 spark that, in the hands of George W Bush and his top officials, helped turn this country into a lockdown state and first set significant portions of the Greater Middle East aflame. In that sense, bin Laden has been thriving in Washington ever since, and no commando raid in Pakistan or elsewhere has a chance of doing him in.

Since the al-Qaeda leader was aware of the relative powerlessness of his organization and its hundreds or, in its heyday, perhaps thousands of active followers, his urge was to defeat the US by provoking its leaders into treasury-draining wars in the Greater Middle East. In his world, it was thought that such a set of involvements - and the "homeland" security down payments that went with them - could bleed the richest, most powerful nation on the planet dry. In this, he and his associates, imitators, and wannabes were reasonably canny. The bin Laden tax, including that $120 million for Inauguration Day, has proved heavy indeed.

In the meantime, he - and 9/11 as it entered the American psyche - helped facilitate the locking down of this society in ways that should unnerve us all. The resulting United States of Fear has since engaged in two disastrous more-than-trillion dollar wars and a "Global War on Terror" that shows no sign of ending in our lifetime. (See Yemen, Pakistan, and Mali.) It has also funded the supersized growth of a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy; that post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security, and, of course, the Pentagon and the US military, including the special operations forces, an ever-expanding secret military elite cocooned within it.