The selectiveness of the US "War on Terrorism" was grimly demonstrated this past week by the long-overdue death of one of the world's most notorious terrorists: 67-year-old Jonas Savimbi, a man almost single-handedly responsible for plunging Angola into 27 years of civil war that has cost at least 1.5 million lives. By comparison, the World Trade Center death toll is barely noticable. Savimbi and his UNITA armies operated in the style of true terrorist guerrillas: randomly attacking and massacring, holding civilian lives (and deaths) hostage to their political demands, showing levels of barbarism meant to terrify others (and, one suspects, titillate themselves and their patrons).

But Savimbi has never been called a terrorist by American media, because for much of his career, he was our guy. The Angolan conflict became mired in the politics of the Cold War; first the apartheid government of South Africa, and then the US itself, started sending weapons and money early on to help Savimbi's fledgling UNITA effort become a genuine threat. The left-leaning Angola government responded by importing Cuban soldiers (Cuba, culturally, because of its large black population, identifies far more with sub-Saharan Africa than the US ever has). The Castro experiment in exporting worldwide commie revolution had the predictable enemy-of-my-enemy effect: by 1976, Savimbi became a statesman, much beloved by the US, even as his troops ventured from their jungle hideaways to carry out massacre after massacre. In recent years, following battlefield setbacks, UNITA has concentrated on ambushes and on peppering the countryside with land mines. A freedom fighter, in other words.

Of course, Savimbi was smart enough (and, after a couple decades at it, experienced enough) not to depend on the political vagarities of US support. He took his weapons where he could get them; originally trained in Maoist China, he went on to fight the quasi-Marxist MPLA (the Angolan government) as a self-styled "African nationalist" while accepting the patronage of apartheid South Africa. Savimbi, like all pathological mass murders, justified his terrorist war crimes as being for "the people."

Particularly after the end of the Cold War, Savimbi tapped into the same source of black market cash that has fueled the near-genocidal civil war recently in the Congo: the diamond trade. By seizing lucrative diamond mines in rural Angola (one of the few things left to fight for in the now desperately impoverished country), Savimbi had been able to exploit what became the drug and arms merchants' money-laundering scheme of choice in the '90s: European diamond merchants who pay cash on the barrel, no questions asked. (Antwerp dealers, against much industry opposition, have been making slow headway recently in adopting a code of ethics that would put a stop to diamond-financed bloodshed throughout the Third World.)

At least three times in the '90s, Savimbi torpedoed peace talks aimed at ending the endless war, a war that, beyond all the death, has displaced millions more and ravaged the country's economy. His death (from a stray bullet in battle) is the best thing to happen in decades to the long-suffering country's prospects for peace.

But because Savimbi never (to our knowledge) conspired to topple a Manhattan skyscraper, and because US media seem almost pathologically convinced that Africans don't value life as much as we "civilized" people, news accounts of his death haven't even mentioned the "t" word, and have carefully downplayed the US role in his rise to glory.

Savimbi was famously quoted as saying that UNITA began as a movement of "12 people with knives." Those people, and the others that followed, somehow graduated from knives to modern warfare, and the US (along with its racist partners in Pretoria) made it possible. Savimbi is the first confirmed death of a world-class terrorist during the so-called "War on Terrorism." Too bad we weren't aiming for him.