It really is a pity the Americans (or better, the Pakistanis), have not tracked Osama bin Laden down to his cave by now, and eliminated him from the debate over the future of politics, both East and West. As we heard over the weekend, he is still issuing his somewhat low-tech messages to the world.
In his most recent video – which seems as genuine as the previous ones – he sounds more than ever like a Left Democrat who just happens to be Muslim. The best moment was when he cited Noam Chomsky as an authority on U.S. foreign policy. We cannot know what media he is receiving in his current abode, but from his general understanding of developments in the West, we might guess it is the standard mainstream news media package that comes with almost any cable or telephone/Internet hook-up. He utters clichés – including cheap Marxist nostrums, now mixed with boilerplate on global warming – that make me think only an editor, a shave, and a few wardrobe alterations stand between him and co-hosting documentaries with Al Gore.
On second thought, maybe he isn’t worth taking out. The more paranoiac among my readers are free to speculate that Karl Rove was behind the brilliant strategy to intentionally avoid any sort of military encounter in which Osama might be captured. The idea would have been, to let him keep talking on videos via Al-Jazeera, until he has become part of the background noise across the Arab-Islamic world, and his popularity has fallen to George Bush levels.
Perhaps I should not make so light of a man who has the blood of more than 3,000 Americans on his hands, from events on 9/11 and before, to which has since been added the blood of thousands more of many nationalities, through other arms of Al-Qaeda operating across Europe, Africa, and Asia. And yet I want to call attention to the pathetic nature of this man’s call to arms.
For six years now I have been arguing that there is nothing in the Islamist threat that a robust West could not have seen off in a few quick self-confident strokes. The irony – if I may abuse that word in the standard contemporary way – is that Osama and his colleagues on both Sunni-Arab and Shia-Persian sides of the Islamist political movement are able to flourish precisely because we have lost confidence in ourselves and in western ideals that were once unquestioned except by fanatics. Moral relativism, multiculturalism, political correctness—these are all aspects of a mental debilitation that makes us unable to recognize and respond coherently and decisively to an external threat.
“Vietnam syndrome” is yet another aspect, feeding at the moral entrails specifically of the United States. Given an enemy as wicked as the communists in Vietnam, or the Islamists in Iraq – we assume defeat before the battle has started, and spend the time of the engagement asking, “Where did we go wrong?”
It is six years since America and the world woke to realize that “nothing could be the same,” and when even people on the left were admitting that time had come to abandon self-examination and start waving flags. But while it took the better part of the 1960s to mobilize opposition to the Vietnam war, the lobby for cutting and running from Iraq had already hit the ground before the American invasion.
What do I mean by a robust western response?
It was reasonably clear from the morning of 9/11, and obvious by the afternoon, that Islamist terror cells were able to operate internationally because they enjoyed sanctuary within rogue regimes scattered across the Middle East. Police work, within the West alone, was not going to get significant results. The argument for doing something about the rogue regimes was, and remains, unanswerable. Given the possibility of terror attacks with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, looking away was not an option. We had to respond in such a way, that no one could wish to have a rogue regime.
Each nation state must take responsibility for what is allowed to happen on its soil. To my mind, owing to domestic political realities, President Bush went wrong only in stopping at Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamists remain in power in Iran, under semi-formal sponsorship in Syria, and informal or private sponsorship elsewhere. North Korea, a supplier of technology and parts to the worst Middle Eastern regimes, may or (more probably) may not have been neutralized by cumbersome diplomatic efforts.
And yet the U.S. Congress is discussing the “quagmire” in Iraq. And we have the spectacle of Congressmen trying to undercut the credibility of General Petraeus, just as he is able to report that, after years of trial and error, the U.S. military is finally getting a handle on how to conduct counter-insurgency operations there.
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