The other day, the headline fairly screamed out at me, almost breathlessly (I’m taking votes of whether that qualifies as an oxymoron): “Al Qaida’s No. 2 killed,” it said.
It’s been 19 years since 9/11, when we first learned of Al Qaida, its aims and its terror tactics. In that time, we still haven’t come up with a consensus on how to spell it (some say Al Queda, for example).
And we can’t settle on who’s No. 2 on the depth chart. But how can we? Everyone who ever gets the job gets killed — or so we’re led to believe. My only advice to whoever is approached to be Al Qaida’s No. 2 man is this: turn it down! The turnover rate is staggering.
No. 1, of course, is no longer with us. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 while luxuriating in his Pakistan hideaway. I don’t even know who took his place, because by then, we had a shiny new toy: ISIS.
When George W. Bush was president, we’d see stories periodically, originating from some defense department operative, that Al Qaida’s No. 2 had been killed. I always felt these “victories” in the “war on terror” were orchestrated solely to get the jackals of the media off the administration’s back.
I understand the impulse to put the best face on this as possible. The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were so horrific, so evil, that there was a natural, and justified, hunger for revenge. Just like Pearl Harbor. The only difference is that here, all we had was a nebulous network of terrorists, bankrolled by bin Laden, with no concrete national representation.
Still, even with that lack of knowledge, doing nothing at all was not an option. This sentiment led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the former on the pretext that bin Laden was hiding out there; the latter on the pretext of, well, I’m not sure, exactly. Easy target? Familiar patsy? Just because? Pick one).
Once we got bogged down in Iraq, however, we had to come up with another way to make it seem as if we were making progress in the “war on terror.” So we’d kill someone (or say we killed someone) in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, and dub the person “Al Qaida’s No. 2 person,” or “the man who helped mastermind 9/11.”
Sometimes, this seems like we’re reporting about the 6,000 people sticking up out of the grassy knoll with rifles in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. At some point, it just goes beyond ridiculous.
You don’t hear much about Al Qaida these days. There are so many other hot spots in the world, such as China, Iran, and North Korea — not to mention the coronavirus — that it’s fallen down on the list, as has ISIS. I guess you can’t hate everyone with egalitarian passion.
It’s always been my contention that we always seem to have one or two “enemies” that rise to the top of the list, and they revolve. If it’s not North Korea, it’s Iran. Or it’s China. Or it’s Russia and Vladimir Putin. Seldom does anyone stop and ask, “Wait. Why are we always at odds with some country halfway around the world?”
This is, I know, a gross oversimplification of complicated geopolitics. But I swear, there are times we pour our own gasoline on these little fires to start the conflagration that turns them into international crises. Then we mobilize until something else comes along.
There is often an ulterior motive on the part of our fearless leaders to keep us all on edge. Often, they create the crisis that they can then solve — an accusation some people made quite liberally to throw shade on John F. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis.
So, ergo, every so often — even now, apparently — another No. 2 Al Qaida guy gets killed.
It just doesn’t pay to be No. 2.
