The BBC has a surprisingly amusing line about al Qaida today:
“But then al-Qaeda is also not what it was. It used to be a tight little group of secretive plotters.
It is now a franchise, like a militant version of Kentucky Fried Chicken with Bin Laden as a kind of evil Colonel Sanders.”
Evil Colonel Sanders! That line could have been lifted straight out of an Austin Powers’ movie!
But on a more serious note, the article makes what I consider to be a factual mistake later on:
“But the energy spent on tracking down the world’s most wanted man over the last five years has sucked vital resources from ensuring that the climate that allowed for the creation of al-Qaeda in the first place did not return.”
Is it really the energy spent tracking down Osama bin Laden which has contributed so much to the instability in Afghanistan, or the fact that the Bush administration sucked all of the nation-building resources out when it launched its optional war against Iraq? My money is on the latter.
They are two sides of the same coin. It could be argued that the U.S. didn’t catch bin Laden and at the same time allowed Afghanistan to slide back into chaos for the very same reason: Bush took his eye off the ball to settle his score with Saddam Hussein.
