The regime, however, has carefully avoided defending bin Laden; its interest is simply in assailing the United States.
The official comment from Ramin Mehman-Parast, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, holds bin Laden’s death eliminates “any excuse” for the United States to keep any troops in Afghanistan.
Mehman-Parast’s unstated premise was that US troops are in Afghanistan solely to kill or capture bin Laden. The United States, however, has long said it believed bin Laden was across the border in Pakistan. The 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan have been there chiefly fighting the Taliban for almost a decade.
Mehman-Parast also painted bin Laden as if he were the world’s only terrorist. The spokesman said, “The United States and it allies have no more excuse to deploy forces in the Middle East under the pretext of fighting terrorism.”
Over at the Majlis, Alaeddin Borujerdi, the chairman of the National Security Committee, took an entirely different line. He simply didn’t believe that bin Laden was dead.
“They [the Americans] have announced several times that bin Laden is dead,” Borujerdi said. “This is not new.”
A number of media outlets have carried reports over the years that bin Laden had been killed, but the US government has never claimed to have killed him and has called all the published reports of his death false. Borujerdi did not say where he got the idea that the US government had previously declared bin Laden dead, but it says something about the quality of his research.
Another Majlis deputy, Javad Jahangirzadeh, told the Fars news agency he had no doubt that bin Laden was dead and that the Americans had killed him. But he said the US knocked him off so bin laden couldn’t leak information about how the US and bin Laden had cooperated to carry out terrorist actions together.
State television came up with yet another rationale. In its morning news report Monday, it said, “For Obama and the Democrats who are busy with their election campaigns, this was apparently the best time to announce the killing of bin Laden. Perhaps, the announcement might divert the public’s attention from the economic crisis and the Alabama storm and the Obama Administration’s incompetence in the face of such crises.”
The theme that news events are manufactured in order to divert attention from other issues is very popular throughout the Middle East.