Osama and Che

Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967, at a time when that country was under U.S. economic and military influence.  Today, Bolivia has a social-democratic government under an indigenous president, Evo Morales, a powerful voice for world change.  Latin America as a whole has moved decisively to the left, with Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva feeling sure enough of his international status to team up with Turkey to offer Iran a way out of its fuel reprocessing problem.

So what can we expect from the death of Osama bin Laden?  It will not take 40 years for the Muslim world to complete its transition to modernity, with its own version of social democracy.

Commentators are just now catching on to the fact that the upheavals in the Middle East are partly between Sunni and Shi’a, and partly between nationalists, modernists and tribalists.

Whatever happens, let’s not try to implement former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘snowflake’ memo quoted in his recent book: Lets “pick ‘eight or ten important countries, asking ourselves what we would like them to look like five or ten years from now, and then fashioning plans to achieve that.’

It’s just been announced on TV that the government will release a photograph of bin Laden’s body.  Just like it did with Che. Let’s not repeat a century of interference in Latin American in the Middle East.  Let’s turn our energies toward home, and create our own social democracy.