The New Bin Laden Tape
I begin my first post with the sudden (re-) injection of Osama Bin Laden (or his body double) into the American political scene four days prior to the general election. Hearing parts of the translation on NPR, I couldn't help wondering whether middle America might not perceive an unholy alliance between Michael Moore, John Kerry, and (gasp!) Osama himself. Consider the following Times excerpt:
Next consider this line from the Bin Laden tape: "Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you." Again, not unreasonable at all. To accuse Bush of lying, of hiding things, is not the delusional, bitter cry of radical Islamism: it could be the bitter cry of Michael Moore. Hell, given the facts, it could even be a Hertzberg piece in the New Yorker.
Consider also this line: "Any state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security....Oh, American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results." The first statement has a tit-for-tat ring to it. Far Left critics of American "neo-imperialism," e.g. Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky soon after the 9/11 attacks, seem to have characterized the motivation of 9/11 hijackers as purely political: the oppressed fighting back. Osama almost concurs.
This way of characterizing the 9/11 hijackers, I've long felt, is misleading and incorrect. To justify the 9/11 attacks on the basis of American injustices abroad is morally untenable, and to think in terms of purely political dichotomies such as the "superpower vs. the global South" misses out on the enormous draw--psychological and spiritual--of radical Islamism. Since 2001, I was more sympathetic to Christopher Hitchens' notion of "Islamo-Fascism" than I was to Chomsky's moral equivalency thesis. (Hitchens' urgency about Iraq, though, was misplaced). As well, I've been sympathetic when writers have highlighted the individual, psychological aspects of this phenomenon, as opposed to the stark power-based analysis. (I could've sworn there was a piece off of A & L Daily that I read last summer that offered a compelling of a torn Mohammed Atta who "chose" Islamic radicalism as the solution).
But the very fact that Bin Laden makes an appearance four days before the U.S. election and lampoons and criticizes Bush along much the same lines as Moore and Kerry is, well, a bit surreal. And it's all potentially damaging to Kerry. (Has anyone else noticed the weirdness?) After all, recall that one of the Republicans' running themes has been that Kerry would acquiesce to other nations, and, as "an unprincipled anti-war flip-flopper," by extension, to the terrorists too. And the GOP has continually insinuated that criticizing the President is tantamount to agreeing with the terrorists. Now inject into this loaded situation a Bin Laden who criticizes Bush for being weak and deceitful, and who calls out to Americans they cease harming Muslims. Consider that Kerry has also criticized Bush for not reaching out to Muslims, for losing the "battle over hearts and minds in the Middle East"...Hmm...wouldn't it be very tempting for a naïve observer to conceptualize a dichotomy with Bush one end and Kerry/Bin Laden on the other?
No small wonder, then, that Kerry responded to the to this strongly and abruptly, much more so than Bush. And he does:
The recent Bin Laden message and his last one in April, the audiotape offering a truce to European countries should they pull out of Iraq and other Muslim countries, leads me to wonder whether Al Qaeda isn't evolving, perhaps getting smarter. Perhaps they've moved away from "Islamo-Fascism" toward something distinctly more political than religious. Or perhaps, they're just cloaking their "Islamo-fascism" better, in the language of quasi-tolerance and truces. Or perhaps the Chomsky-Zinn circles were right about Al Qaeda after all, if not right about the individual motivations of people like Mohammed Atta, i.e. that its primary aim is to seek redress for grievances committed by the U.S. upon the world stage. After all, Bin Laden has long made concrete, political demands, like the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia or the withdrawal of U.S. support for Israel. Yet these political aims tie into the larger religious vision of having "pure" Islamic states with "pure" Islamic leaders. And both aims resonante with a mass psychology that glorifies violent self-sacrifice for the cause of establishing "pure" Islam (rewarded with a Paradise containing decidedly less "pure" things like rivers of wine and virgins, though some Muslims contest this). And while corrupt Arab regimes and their Islamist antagonists have both pumped such notions into the mass psychology, the individuals most likely to take up the cause through violent martyrdom aren't day laborers in Cairo or Baghdad but the highly "Westernized" once-playboy sons of rich oil sheikhs. It's not a leap to speculate that in Mohammed Atta's psyche, there raged a Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" not found in the macro-picture of actual international affairs.
In marked contrast, Osama's rhetoric is changing from fire-and-brimstone jihadism to quasi-conciliatory pleas hinting of calculated Realpolitik. I'm not sure whether this is legitimate political leveraging or morally untenable blackmail, but either way, it's "smart" from the vantage point of goals--Europeans already pissy about Iraq seem now even more reluctant to touch it, and the Spanish voted out its government shortly after the Madrid bombings (though arguably Aznar was on shaky grounds even before the bombings). If Bin Laden or his movement got any smarter, a year from now, you might hear Bin Laden start to issue Clintonisms like "I feel your pain."
Mr. bin Laden said Mr. Bush reacted slowly to the Sept. 11 attacks as they were occurring, giving the hijackers more time than they expected to carry out the plot. At the time of the attacks, the president was visiting a group of second graders at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla., holding a book called "My Pet Goat."
"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone," Mr. bin Laden said, referring to estimates of the number of people who might have been at the World Trade Center.
Referring to the president, Mr. bin Laden said: "It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God."
Setting aside the (expected, profound) shift in moral perspective regarding "the operations, thank God," Osama's criticism of Bush is almost reasonable. After all, on hearing the news, our President did sit there in the classroom for a good while, doing very little. For starters, this jab at Bush shows that Osama watched Fahrenheit 9/11 along with the rest of us. (But Bin Laden's sarcasm misses the point slightly–-it wasn't so much the Bush was transfixed with rapt attention to the pet goat story as transfixed by utter confusion and inability to think of what to do, i.e. how to lead.) But Osama's derision of the President, alongside Moore's, is just the beginning of the unholy alliance.
Next consider this line from the Bin Laden tape: "Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you." Again, not unreasonable at all. To accuse Bush of lying, of hiding things, is not the delusional, bitter cry of radical Islamism: it could be the bitter cry of Michael Moore. Hell, given the facts, it could even be a Hertzberg piece in the New Yorker.
Consider also this line: "Any state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security....Oh, American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results." The first statement has a tit-for-tat ring to it. Far Left critics of American "neo-imperialism," e.g. Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky soon after the 9/11 attacks, seem to have characterized the motivation of 9/11 hijackers as purely political: the oppressed fighting back. Osama almost concurs.
This way of characterizing the 9/11 hijackers, I've long felt, is misleading and incorrect. To justify the 9/11 attacks on the basis of American injustices abroad is morally untenable, and to think in terms of purely political dichotomies such as the "superpower vs. the global South" misses out on the enormous draw--psychological and spiritual--of radical Islamism. Since 2001, I was more sympathetic to Christopher Hitchens' notion of "Islamo-Fascism" than I was to Chomsky's moral equivalency thesis. (Hitchens' urgency about Iraq, though, was misplaced). As well, I've been sympathetic when writers have highlighted the individual, psychological aspects of this phenomenon, as opposed to the stark power-based analysis. (I could've sworn there was a piece off of A & L Daily that I read last summer that offered a compelling of a torn Mohammed Atta who "chose" Islamic radicalism as the solution).
But the very fact that Bin Laden makes an appearance four days before the U.S. election and lampoons and criticizes Bush along much the same lines as Moore and Kerry is, well, a bit surreal. And it's all potentially damaging to Kerry. (Has anyone else noticed the weirdness?) After all, recall that one of the Republicans' running themes has been that Kerry would acquiesce to other nations, and, as "an unprincipled anti-war flip-flopper," by extension, to the terrorists too. And the GOP has continually insinuated that criticizing the President is tantamount to agreeing with the terrorists. Now inject into this loaded situation a Bin Laden who criticizes Bush for being weak and deceitful, and who calls out to Americans they cease harming Muslims. Consider that Kerry has also criticized Bush for not reaching out to Muslims, for losing the "battle over hearts and minds in the Middle East"...Hmm...wouldn't it be very tempting for a naïve observer to conceptualize a dichotomy with Bush one end and Kerry/Bin Laden on the other?
No small wonder, then, that Kerry responded to the to this strongly and abruptly, much more so than Bush. And he does:
"In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period."Josh Marshall observes the relative strengths of the Bush and Kerry here.
The recent Bin Laden message and his last one in April, the audiotape offering a truce to European countries should they pull out of Iraq and other Muslim countries, leads me to wonder whether Al Qaeda isn't evolving, perhaps getting smarter. Perhaps they've moved away from "Islamo-Fascism" toward something distinctly more political than religious. Or perhaps, they're just cloaking their "Islamo-fascism" better, in the language of quasi-tolerance and truces. Or perhaps the Chomsky-Zinn circles were right about Al Qaeda after all, if not right about the individual motivations of people like Mohammed Atta, i.e. that its primary aim is to seek redress for grievances committed by the U.S. upon the world stage. After all, Bin Laden has long made concrete, political demands, like the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia or the withdrawal of U.S. support for Israel. Yet these political aims tie into the larger religious vision of having "pure" Islamic states with "pure" Islamic leaders. And both aims resonante with a mass psychology that glorifies violent self-sacrifice for the cause of establishing "pure" Islam (rewarded with a Paradise containing decidedly less "pure" things like rivers of wine and virgins, though some Muslims contest this). And while corrupt Arab regimes and their Islamist antagonists have both pumped such notions into the mass psychology, the individuals most likely to take up the cause through violent martyrdom aren't day laborers in Cairo or Baghdad but the highly "Westernized" once-playboy sons of rich oil sheikhs. It's not a leap to speculate that in Mohammed Atta's psyche, there raged a Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" not found in the macro-picture of actual international affairs.
In marked contrast, Osama's rhetoric is changing from fire-and-brimstone jihadism to quasi-conciliatory pleas hinting of calculated Realpolitik. I'm not sure whether this is legitimate political leveraging or morally untenable blackmail, but either way, it's "smart" from the vantage point of goals--Europeans already pissy about Iraq seem now even more reluctant to touch it, and the Spanish voted out its government shortly after the Madrid bombings (though arguably Aznar was on shaky grounds even before the bombings). If Bin Laden or his movement got any smarter, a year from now, you might hear Bin Laden start to issue Clintonisms like "I feel your pain."
posted by The Neologistocrat at 1:18 AM
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