The irony of Osama bin Laden – and I hope this doesn't come as news to anyone by this point – is that he was trained by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. His Mujahadeen fighters were hailed as heroes in the West during that conflict. No movie serves to underline this fact more than Rambo 3, which devotes the film to the “heroic fighters of Afghanistan” in a stirring coda before the end credits. We get along with other nations for as long as it suits us, then we go to war. Remember Saddam Hussein? There is a picture of President Clinton shaking his hand back when Iraq and the U.S. shared good relations. Joseph Stalin? Had his picture taken with President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Chapters of the Nazi Party sprung up all over the developed West before World War II (including Australia) and anti-Semitism was commonplace, until war with Germany made those things unpopular. The Cold War is filled with the stories of corrupt rulers being propped up by the United States for no better reason than that they were anti-Communist. U.S. state-sponsored terrorism was common (the Nicaraguan Contras, whom the CIA funded by selling drugs, are the most infamous example). Think the West has always been the good guys? Think again.
Though the United States bear the brunt of criticism for alleged imperialism these days, they were hardly the first, or even the worst offender. Western exploitation of the rest of the world has been going on long before the United States was even a superpower. The British Empire, for example, based the entire African economy on slave trading, then abolished the trade. Slavery itself was still legal, and the trade was more-or-less defunct by the time it was abolished anyway (by this point slaves were numerous enough to be bred on the plantations they worked). Consider what would happen if the entire Australian economy was based on mining, and suddenly no-one bought our minerals. Overnight, the economy would utterly collapse – and it did in Africa. The country still hasn't recovered.
Similarly, the British turned India into one big money-pot for themselves at the expense of the locals, and reintroduced the then-defunct (and utterly unfair) caste system that endures today. Egypt's attempts at modernisation during the mid-1800s were foiled when British investors repossessed the wealth-generating Suez Canal for themselves, a critical asset that was only returned 100 years later. Finally, the British East India Company – a private corporation – waged a successful war on China in the 1860s because China refused to buy their opium anymore, since it was creating too many drug addicts. Imagine if Apple smashed down your door and beat you up until you bought an iPod, and that's pretty much what the EIC did to China. China has only recently recovered from the full effects of the Opium Wars, and they certainly haven't forgotten the indignity they suffered at the hands of the West.
What is the point I am making? It’s that while Osama bin Laden committed an abhorrent act of terrorism on 9/11, history is riddled with heinous acts by the West against other countries. We need to get off our high horse and get some perspective. 3,000 lives were taken on 9/11, a terrible number; but stop to consider that 3,000 people starve to death on a quiet Sunday in Africa. Many millions of Indians live in hereditary poverty and squalor because of the caste system. China has managed to become a significant world power in contemporary times, but it took several civil wars for them to regain their pre-Opium Wars stability. And the West bears much responsibility for all of these things.
So, I think those crowds who were waving American flags outside the White House to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden, with some misguided idea that justice had been done, need to realise that their hemisphere has plenty of blood on its hands too… but perhaps events that far away are a little too difficult to see from the moral high ground.
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