http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-boot-bin-laden-20110503,0,2161613.story

Here is Max Boot on Osama bin Laden. A Neo-Conservative Historical Fiction might be a more apt subtitle of his latest opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times of May 3, 2011. Erased from this historical sketch in service to an ideological ‘reading’ of history is the very pertinent information that the mujahedeen was armed and supported by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter, as one of the proxy conflicts, as a policy pursued in the name of Cold War necessity ,to check the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan. The mujahedeen were the precursors of Al Qaeda. That, of course, does not easily fit into Mr. Boot’s eventual narrative terminus. Mr. Boot like most of his intellectual allies posits the existence of bin Laden as a ‘small dreamy child’ turned ‘mad man’ and mass murderer. But the question might be asked by even the most casual observer: What exactly politicized this ‘small dreamy child’? except for the incurious Mr. Boot.  But a quote from this piece will show that Mr. Boot is simply engaging in backhanded apologetics for the War in Iraq.

‘Yet for all the havoc wreaked in Al Qaeda’s name — tens of thousands would die in Iraq alone — it is notable how little Bin Laden and his followers managed to achieve. They did not topple a single regime anywhere. Instead, by slaughtering so many Muslims, they turned Muslim opinion against them.’

Mr. Boot believes in the infinite malleability of History: the Noble Lie is the very stuff of Neo-Conservatism’s Platonic political nostalgia. But Mr. Boot is not a maladroit propagandist, he is careful enough to simply allude, suggest to  historical events that he presents as having  happened ,  and  then engages in comparisons with his other inventions ,  that did not happen, but are stated as ‘fact’ in the body of his text: he freely invents a self-reinforcing rhetoric of lies. He is more effective than his confreres, his fellow travelers; they have chosen the cudgel while Mr. Boot relies on rhetorical stealth. One need only recall the invasion of Iraq by American forces and the savage attack on Fallujah in which white phosphorous was used on a civilian population; followed by the celebrated ‘Surge’: a three billion dollar a week bribery program, reduced to its simplest terms. One finds the assertion ‘that tens of thousands would die in Iraq alone’, as being the responsibility of Al Qaeda, boggles the mind of any serious inquirer, yet Mr. Boot continues to rationalize the irrational, the unforgivable, the murderous.

Literary Hack