By Mona Anis For days I have racked my brains for an upbeat note to write on. Unfortunately, the news of bin Laden's demise on Monday, and the grueling images that have been leaked since, brings one back to the sombre reality of the alleged War on Terror, something that has consumed the first decade of this century. More images will be released no doubt, once the US administration has pondered how and when to make public those secret photos and videos of the operation which we saw President Obama and his advisers intensely watching in the White House Situation Room. Of the decision to make some images public, John Brennan, President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, said "This needs to be done thoughtfully." Thoughtful, indeed! On morning TV, I saw Brennan struggling to find the right words for what was done with bin Laden's corpse: "dispose of" is the term he used instantaneously, before quickly thinking of "burial" instead -- burial in water! The reason for such expedience, we were told, is that Muslims believe in the fastest possible burial as a means to honouring the dead. Most Muslim clerics, however, were quick to declare burial in water against Islam. The theology of burial notwithstanding, I find attempts by US officials to placate Muslims under such conditions rather more offensive than if they simply kept their mouths shut. In the end such self-righteousness -- characteristic of US foreign policy since the War on Terror -- is the reason why so many people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are baffled by the razzmatazz now taking place in America. By depicting what was simply a manhunt in the department of crime as an all-out war -- the military raid on a house in a foreign country as a war victory -- one feels ambivalent at best. Nor is my ambivalence shameful, as it seems to me: it is perfectly possible to condemn terrorism -- up to and including the atrocious attacks of 11 September 2001-- and still detest the kind of imperialist foreign policy practiced by Washington since long before the attack on the Twin Towers. One can hate what bin Laden stands for and not like "disposing of his corpse" in the sea. The frenzied firefight in the high- walled compound of Abbottabad, where bin Laden had lived in hiding, did not kill bin Laden alone. Inside the compound, according to official US sources, there were 23 children, nine women, two men, and more. How many of those were killed in the raid, we still don't know. And what will happen to those still alive? One BBC correspondent in Abbottabad said on Tuesday the commandos who carried out the operation had planned to take hostages had they not been forced to leave one of three helicopters behind -- that is all I know. Rather than facing the reality of the bin Laden phenomenon for what it was -- a bunch of extremists aided and abetted by the CIA during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan -- the US chose to fabricate an alternative reality in which the struggle against "Islamic terrorism" became obligatory moral-religious dogma whatever else you believed. Otherwise you risk being accused of harbouring both terrorist and anti-American sentiments, since the two were now merged into one all- inclusive ideology. And where else would this War on Terror take place but in the predominantly Muslim world, in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, as the attack in Pakistan this week shows? Watching the images broadcast on Monday and Tuesday of the Abbotabad compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden spent his final days, I am reminded of the depopulated and desolate wasteland which Eliot chose as an overarching image for post-WWI Europe; a waste land made barren by an ignoble war that shows respect for neither sovereignty nor international law. Last week I borrowed from T S Eliot's The Waste Land its opening lines. This week, inspired by the burial in water of Osama bin Laden, I borrow the closing lines of the poem's first section. In an unreal city, the poet encounters the apparition of a fallen war comrade and asks him a series of questions about a corpse buried in his garden. The inquiries turn out to be an exercise in futility, since the dead offer few answers indeed: "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? "Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! "You! hypocrite lecteur! -- mon semblable, -- mon frere!"
