Historical perspective on Osama Bin Laden.......

And more thoughts...
What's Bill doing in China? Ah ha! He's just trying to keep up with things...take a look around...see for himself. Dear Readers are invited to join him for a drink in Beijing or Shanghai. Darius has details: darius.m.fisher@gmail.com

*** Times have changed. When governments sent out hit squads to kill someone, they used to keep quiet about it. But this time, Obama called a national press conference to claim credit. His poll ratings rose.

Rarely has a killing been such a crowd pleaser. There was dancing in the streets. It recalled the happy mob that kicked around Louis 16th's head or the crowd that spat upon Mussolini's corpse. Americans were jubilant. The newspapers were universally joyful and upbeat. "Mission accomplished," said the editorials.

Arms maker Berretta took out a full-page ad in the weekend USA Today to applaud the Navy SEALS who pulled the trigger. Beretta and other handgun makers typically apologize when their products are used to kill unarmed civilians. This time, they were using it to gain market share.

And feeling their oats, US officials decided to try to make it two for two, with a drone attack on a "terror suspect," in Yemen. The radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi survived, reported the Hong Kong paper.

Asked where in the Constitution the federal government was given the right to murder people, Eric Holder, US Attorney General, replied that this was certainly not murder. And not an assassination either. This was war! Osama bin Laden was an enemy combatant. US forces mounted an operation to kill him, as they might target an opposing general. Fair and square.

But if Osama bin Laden were an enemy general, his was a strange army. How many divisions did he have? Where were his warships? His aircraft carriers? His submarines? Where were his tanks? And his trained legions? He had no army. No navy. No marines. No air force. Not even a few praetorians guarding his headquarters. He was almost alone. No Swiss guards, no home guard; for there was no homeland to guard. And not a single troop carrier, for there were no troops and nowhere to take them. He had no tanks. No fighter planes. No bombers. No artillery. In fact, his most effective weapon was the lowly box cutter.

A fanatic with a box cutter can be dangerous; but he is no Grande Armée...no Wehrmacht...no Japanese Imperial Army. He is not a worthy opponent for the Pentagon, in other words; for there is no glory in picking on someone who's not your own size.

As the week moved on, glory turned to embarrassment. The terrorist was not armed. He didn't use his wife as a human shield. He didn't live in a mansion surrounded by armed guards. Instead, it began to look like the SEALS had gunned down a sick, broken old invalid.

But what an opportunity! Forget the messy court trials. Who knows how they might turn out...or what information they might reveal? The government spends a fortune trying to convict mobsters and drug pushers, for example. Why not just declare war on them, and send in hit squads? And now the SEC is laboring hard to convict a fund manager in the Galleon case. It would be so much simpler to label SEC violators 'financial terrorists' - and let drones take care of them.

But wait, we're missing the biggest opportunity of all. Other countries have done it for years; why shouldn't we? Instead of defeating political enemies at the polls, why not just say you are at war with them and take them out? Take Donald Trump, for example. Here at The Daily Reckoning, we are warming up to Mr. Trump. He is our kind of politician. Too rich to steal. Too dumb to lie. But he is surely a threat to the Republic. So why not call in a drone attack?

Why waste drones on Osama bin Laden? He posed no real threat to the government of the United States of America. Even in his own backyard, he was a loser. He was unable to take over a single woebegone, Muslim- drenched country in the Mid-East. There was never any question that he would be able to defeat the US.

Nor was he a substantial threat to the American people. For all his box cutters and suicidal followers, statistically - according to The Financial Times - he did less damage to Americans than accidents caused by wild deer. In the 10 years following the announcement of the War on Terror, as far as we know, he was not responsible for a single North American casualty. As a general, he was worse than any we ever heard of; even Sir Douglas Haig was not that bad.

Osama bin Laden didn't pose a threat to the US or its people; instead, the danger he posed was more like the danger of an interest-only, low- doc, automatically reset mortgage with a teaser rate. Bin Laden, in an early video address, announced his strategy. He could sucker the US into spending an enormous amount of money to combat him. He would not try to defeat the US on the field of battle; instead, he would lure the giant into expenses it could not afford.

And lo, it has come to pass just as the bearded one forecast. According to The Financial Times, the US has spent $2 trillion on the war against terror...or about a million times more than Osama bin Laden spent.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning

Gold and Guns.......

The New Arms Race

Consumers and Investors Seek Protection With Guns and Gold

Eric Fry

Reporting from Laguna Beach, California...

Even after last week's steep selloff in the commodities markets, the "Flight to Safety" trade is still on...big time. Gold may have retreated from its all-time high, but applications to purchase a handgun continue soaring to record levels.

According to the FBI, background-check applications for handgun buyers are on a record-setting pace so far this year. "In this year's first quarter," Bloomberg News reports, "the FBI's Instant Criminal Background Check System processed 4.25 million requests on prospective gun buyers - up 16% from a year earlier." If the current pace continues, the number of "gun checks" would hit a seventh straight annual record

America's gun-buying craze stands in stark contrast to the dismal trend of overall consumer spending. Bloomberg notes that spending on guns, ammo and other sporting equipment rose about 10% during the last 12 months - or more than four times the 2.5% increase in total consumer spending. Although spending on guns and ammo has been outpacing total consumer spending for more than a decade, the gun-buying trend has been accelerating during the last few months.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart CEO, Mike Duke, observes that the retail giant's "core shoppers" are "running out of money much faster than a year ago." Since many of Wal-Mart's core shoppers live paycheck to paycheck, they typically do most of their shopping at the beginning of the month...and less of it at the end. "Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month, even more than last year," Duke says. "This end-of-month [purchases] cycle is growing to be a concern."

This troubling trend is not just a Wal-Mart thing. As a retailer that averages 140 million shoppers per week to its US stores, Wal-Mart's "concern" is also the American economy's concern. Wal-Mart is, as CNNMoney puts it, "a barometer of the health of the consumer and the economy. Wal-Mart has struggled with seven straight quarters of sales declines in its stores."

Maybe that's why Wal-Mart announced last week that it would resume selling guns and ammo in many of its stores - ending a five-year hiatus. (Handguns will not return to Wal-Mart shelves, but rifles and other "long guns" will, according to a recent press release).

Your California editor is not certain that America's "gun boom" (pun only partially intended) means something, but he suspects it doesn't mean nothing. Roughly 14 million Americans - about one in twenty - tried to buy a handgun last year. Another 16 million will shop for a sidearm this year. These 16 million folks certainly do not share identical motives for their purchases, but they do share an identical objective: to arm themselves. They are buying handguns in record numbers because they are feeling uneasy in record numbers.

It would be easy to dismiss the "gun boom" as an irrelevant cultural curiosity...if it

wasn't so seemingly relevant. Investors are also "arming themselves" in record numbers. They are buying gold and silver and oil and almost any other commodity under the sun. At the same time, they are also unloading US dollars in exchange for almost any other currency under the sun. The Norwegian kroner, Swiss franc, Aussie dollar and Canadian dollar are all trading near all-time highs against the US dollar.

Something serious is going on here. America's economic recovery may be much weaker than advertised, while her economic vulnerability may be much greater than widely believed.

Obama and Osama

*** Osama bin Laden....
Most of the world heaved a sigh of relief when the world's most wanted man was gunned down. Apparently unarmed.
But here at the Daily Reckoning, we were neither relieved nor revenged. We were uneasy. It did not particularly concern us that another world improver was dead; what bothered us was that there were so many left alive. Many of them -- terrorists and terrorist-fighters -- may now be throbbing to commit even larger acts of improvement.
*** Our old friend Doug Casey has more thoughts on Osama bin Laden's killing.
"The whole thing stinks, from top to bottom. You'd think that if they knew where he was, they would have gone out of their way to take him alive -- at almost any cost. Think of the information he would have had! But instead they seemed to go out of their way to kill him, which impresses me as incredibly stupid and counterproductive... Unless they don't want him talking.

"After all, Osama said several times that he had nothing to do with the events of 9/11. But Bush used him, and 9/11, as the casus belli for Afghanistan. It would have been interesting to know who Osama thought was actually behind 9/11.

"Then, after killing him, they dump his body in the Arabian Sea, using the excuse that he had to be interred within 24 hours as a Muslim, and it wasn't possible to bury him because they didn't want to create a shrine. As if they go out of their way to bury every Muslim they kill within 24 hours... I suspect that, in fact, they leave most bodies as a treat for the dogs and the crows. We'll now never know whose body that was. Or exactly how he was killed.

"So now, in any event, all the physical evidence has been disposed of. It's unclear to me if they also executed everyone else in the house -- excuse me, "compound," as any house government agents attack automatically becomes a compound -- where they took him. I suspect everyone was executed. Witnesses are never convenient.
"I have a question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies -- Who watches the watchers? I thought it was ironic that Putin of Russia -- who's undoubtedly put out quite a few orders for hits in his day -- evidenced outrage at the way the U.S. government is trying to kill Gaddafi, now that it seems expedient. I have it here -- Putin said: "Who permitted this, was there any trial? Who took on the right to execute this man, no matter who he is?"

"And he's right. I find it shocking that the U.S. government just takes it upon itself to kill people now, without even a show trial like Saddam got. Of course the government has always had professional killers in its employ -- but it at least had the decency to deny their existence. Now it brags about them, and parades them. It's always had secret prisons too -- but now it's quite overt about Gitmo and renditions and torture.

"Don't get me wrong. I believe Osama is dead -- whenever he died. And I'm glad he's dead. I don't like the things he believed in, especially his especially puritanical version of Islam. But this is not the way these things should be handled. At least not by a supposedly free country."
Regards,
Bill Bonner,
for The Daily Reckoning