Posted on 01/24/2006 10:38:29 AM PST by untenured
History is what no one ever expects to happen, and last week it happened again. A tape was released, purportedly from Osama bin Laden, in which he offered a truce “under fair conditions” with the United States, in order to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the sake of argument, I am going to assume that the tape from Bin Laden is authentic, and that he is sincere in offering a truce. I am aware that these are both bold assumptions, but neither of them affects the question that I want to address, which is, even if it is a ploy, why would bin Laden permit himself to be cast in the light of a suppliant offering a truce? The mere offer of a truce, after all, is an admission of weakness, if not defeat. So, if the tape is authentic, we have to ask the question, Why would bin Laden risk appearing either weak or, worse, defeated, in the eyes of his many followers and admirers in the Muslim world?
It is true that he also threatened more attacks on America, and that he even offered an explanation for why there have been none since 9/11, namely, that he has chosen not to attack us. Of course, this bluster could be simply a way of saving face, of looking tough at a moment of weakness; but, again, we have to ask, Why would Osama bin Laden decide to show such a moment of weakness in the first place?
To see what I mean, imagine the public response if George Bush had made a similar appeal for a truce with al-Qaeda. How would this go over with the American public, and the rest of the world? Wouldn’t such an offer, however sincerely intended, be treated as a sign of exhaustion or even appeasement -- evidence that the United States had grown weary of its struggle against terrorism, and was desperately looking for a way out? Certainly, that is exactly how our enemies would look upon it.
The above argument may, of course, be offered as evidence for rejecting the authenticity of the tape itself, but I want to go out on a limb (quite far out on a limb) and to suggest another possibility, speculative though it may be: Bin Laden is scared, but he is not afraid of our drones hovering perilously close above his head. I want to suggest that bin Laden may be scared of what is currently unfolding in the Muslim world -- not afraid of the march of democracy in the Middle East, but afraid that the Muslim world may be on the brink of tearing itself apart, of plunging back into the feud-blood between Sunnis and Shi’ites that has been the theme-with-variations of all Islamic history; and worse, a blood-feud that might be won not by the Sunni Arabs, who have won virtually all such feuds in the past, but by the Shi’ite Persians, whose history has hitherto been that of the perennial loser.
Since 9/11, the events of the world have not followed Osama bin Laden’s original game plan. 9/11 was designed to unite the Arab world behind bin Laden, to anoint him as its supreme leader and spokesman. It was intended to be a glorious rebirth of the Arab Golden Age. Instead, four years after 9/11, seldom a day goes by in which Muslims are not blowing up, torturing, or beheading their fellow Muslims. In Palestine, Hamas and Fatah are at each other’s throats; in Iraq, it is the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, and the Shi’ites seem to have the upper hand. Surely, that was not part of bin Laden’s grandiose fantasy.
And then there is Shi’ite Iran.
Iran’s new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is looming larger and larger on the world’s stage, and he has behind him an enormous nation of over sixty million people, a large chuck of the world’s oil supply, and an army of 350,000 men. Furthermore, Ahmadinejad appears intent on treading the same path as Pakistan, India, and North Korea in disguising his ambition to make his nation a nuclear power behind a very thin veil -- an astonishingly thin veil -- of developing “atoms for peace.”
Bin Laden had not been heard from in a year. Ahmadinejad seems to be making news every week. When bin Laden speaks, it is on tapes smuggled to al-Jazeera; when Ahmadinejad speaks, it is in front of the cameras of the world. As bin Laden becomes more and more eclipsed, the focus of the world’s attention has turned, with increasingly dismay and alarm, to the histrionics of Ahmadinejad. What will he say next? What will he do next? He has threatened to cut off Iran’s supply of oil to the world, and it seems almost as if he has us over a barrel -- actually, over several millions barrels. And would a man who is willing to use oil as blackmail refrain from using nuclear weapons for the same purpose? What can the beleaguered bin Laden do to top that?
Hitler, in his final days in the bunker, was convinced that the West would realize the danger posed by the Soviet Union and would act to keep Stalin from taking over half of Europe by offering an alliance with Germany to fight against the Bolshevik threat. It was a fantasy, of course -- but, as we all know, Hitler’s fantasy did not make the Soviets less menacing. Is it possible that bin Laden, holed up in a far more primitive bunker, may be entertaining a similar fantasy, offering us a truce, or even (gasp!) an alliance, in order to rebuild a Sunni-dominated Iraq and Afghanistan against the threat posed by the militant Shi’ite state of Iran -- an Iran led by its charismatic demagogue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with his pronounced gift for grabbing the world’s attention -- a kind of Persian Hitler whose career still lies before him, unlike bin Laden, whose glory days are all but done?
Did bin Laden ever imagine that when the Twin Towers went down that their collapse would begin a historical process that would end by making Iraq virtually a Shi’ite state? No -- no more than we did when we removed the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein in the genuine hope that out of the rubble would emerge a modern secular state.
The Bush administration, rightly fearful of an Iraqi drift toward Iran, is currently trying to bring the Sunni Arabs of Iraq back into the government from which we ousted them. Bin Laden, if the tape is authentic, is strangely reaching out to call for a truce, if not a partnership, with the nation that his organization brutally and wantonly attacked over four years ago. Is he acting by the maxim, The enemy of my enemy is my friend? And if so, how should we respond to him, in a world that may soon to be menaced by an enemy, Iran, whose power to do us ill may far transcend whatever resources are still left to Osama bin Laden? And an enemy whose friends, ominously enough, are Russia and China?
Of course, we can no more cut a deal with al-Qaeda to fight with us against militant Shi’a than the Allies in World War Two could cut a deal with Hitler to fight against the Soviets. But whose fault is that? Osama bin Laden set off a chain reaction of events that have led to the destruction of his dream. If he is now in a bunker of delusion, it was his own actions that have put him there.
a truce to regroup and launch another attack...
Each thinks the other are apostates. They've fought many wars for supremacy over the muslim world. There are both Shia and Sunni in Pakistan, and each year they murder eachother by the hundreds or thousands.
The only question is whether they hate eachother more than they hate us. I don't know the answer to that one.
because they're getting their backsides handed to them on a platter . . .
There may be another reason for the "truce" offer.
The Koran more or less instructs muslims to offer their enemies a truce or a chance to surrender. If the offers are refused, anything you do to your enemies is OK.
In the past, OBL has indicated that if Americans or Europeans do certain things or stop doing other things, they can avoid attacks. He did this to observe the forms of jihad, and probably had to make those offers in order to get the authorizing fatwas from religious advisors.
All of OBL's attacks in the past (that we know of) have been conventional. Perhaps, before he makes a WMD attack, he feels it necessary to get another fatwa legalizing the action, meaning the need to make another truce offer?
If that is correct (and its all personal speculation), maybe we have a big non-conventional attack in the offing.
> ... from Osama bin Laden, in which he offered
> a truce “under fair conditions” ...
It wasn't a truce. It was a hudna. Huge difference.
It wasn't an offer to propose one; only to accept one
(binny must think the NYT represents US attitudes).
"fair" is a uselessly ambiguous word under ideal
circumstances. What it means to the don of the
Cutthroat Cult is anyone's guess.
Chilling.
If his offer precedes some devastating attack, one in which many lives are lost, he can argue that the blame is not his; it was Bush who rejected a truce, it was Bush who continued the war, against the will of the American people, as OBL is at pains to point out. Perhaps, in this way OBL considers that he will escape the moral responsibility for the spilling of innocent blood, or even that he will appear merciful and tolerant in having offered a truce beforehand. If that's what OBL has in mind, he won't be much concerned about appearing weak for offering a truce now either.
Oh, Lord, not this again. Harris knows better. Iraq is not "virtually a Shi'ite state," it is an amalgam of Kurd, Shi'ite, Sunni, and others, and the Shi'ites possess a numerical plurality but not the oil-producing areas. Nor were U.S. planners ignorant of what a Shi'ite majority would imply - we were discussing it on FR prior to the intervention.
We weren't after a "secular" state, however possible that would have been in Iraq anyway. We were after a state that does not openly lend state support to terrorist organizations. Period. A more or less secular democracy is an excellent approach to make that situation more or less permanent, but it's a means, not an end.
Bin Laden offered whatever he really offered for one reason only - he's lost. Zarqawi has lost. Zawahiri has lost. They can still conduct wholesale murder, to be sure, but they can't win.
Osama isn't the first megalomaniac radical to attempt a huge atrocity in the expectation that the entire world will be thrown into a ferment advantageous to his cause. He's only the latest in a long line of homicidal maniacs that includes such despicable creatures as Charles Manson and the Aum Shinryo. Unlike them, however, he managed to start something too big to stop.
"a truce to regroup and launch another attack..."
ditto
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