Friday
May132011
Bin Laden Follow-Up: He Didn't Change the Arab World --- He Changed "America" (Engelhardt)
Bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) -- from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking down of our own American world, where we were to cower in terror, while lashing out militarily.
In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after.