Has Bush outfoxed bin Laden?

The terrorist atrocities inflicted on the US have give rise to a new rumor mill that grinds out stories that range from the banal to the bizarre. But a story out of the Middle East has more credibility than most, particularly in certain quarters. Some cooler and more intelligent heads in the Arab world have concluded that Bush has outfoxed the fanatical bin Laden.

Like all fanatics bin Laden is narrowly on his mission while being disconnected from the real world. Far from being the educated man he is said to be he, like his suicide-bombers, is remarkable ignorant of the West, specially the US. Although some of his followers have been educated at Western Universities their education has been confined to technical subjects like engineering. Those, for example, who attended US universities learnt nothing of US history or cultural values, confusing topless bars, which some of them enjoyed, with moral decay and lack of will. The sad fact is that what little they knew of US history and policies came entirely from the country’s anti-American left, which has painted a grossly dishonest picture of America that neatly fitted in with these terrorists’ anti-American dogma thus blinding them further to the political and military consequences of their actions.

As our editor pointed out at a recent seminar in Australia, being narrowly focused to the exclusion of all else is part of the terrorists’ Achilles heel. And so it is with bin Laden. Believing himself to be the hand of God and a follower of the one true faith, or his fanatical version of it, means he operates with an open loop. Therefore there is no negative feedback mechanism to correct his distorted picture of the world. There are no advisers to council restraint or retreat because like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc., he literally believes himself to be the only one capable of interpreting events and predicting their consequences.

Now we have bin Laden’s fundamental weakness. Being truly ignorant of American history and knowing nothing of the country’s political system he has made the mistake of drawing the wrong lesson from a narrow range of fairly recent events by interpreting it in terms of his world view: the refusal of George Bush senior’s to finish off Saddam Hussein, the hasty retreat from Somalia, the successful bombing of US embassies and military bases in Saudi Arabia, the attack on the Cole and Clinton’s self-serving pinprick responses to terrorism.

In bin Laden’s fantasy America would either respond in a Clintonesque way and so demonstrate to the world its cowardly nature or it would blindly strike out, killing hundreds if not thousands of innocents and so inflame the whole of the Islamic world. (Notice how closely his apocalyptic vision resembles the extreme left’s one of a world-wide revolution against capitalism).

He got neither. Instead of grabbing the initiative he made a terrible blunder. His actions pulled the US together, awakening in it a steely resolve that can have only one outcome. Instead of retreating or immediately striking out, President Bush set about building up a mighty military force not only to destroy bin Laden but to demonstrate to the rest of the world the consequences of attacking America. Afghanistan has been isolated, it’s borders sealed.

Battle lines have been drawn and are being supported with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Russia, Tajikstan. Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, even Iran, Pakistan and China are cooperating. British special forces (SAS) are already operating in the country while American special forces are moving in. A coordinated plan consisting of concentrated air attacks on terrorist camps and Taliban installations, special forces assault teams, and the cooperation of the Northern Alliance is being put into action. None of this, so the story goes, is supposed to be happening.

Moreover, there are rumors that the scale of the forces that bin Laden has unleashed has caused subterranean cracks to appear within the Taliban’s ranks, with some of them wondering why they should have to take the fall for bin Laden. The smarter ones know they are not popular among the mass of Afghans, and that if properly equipped and supported by Western powers the Northern Alliance would drive them back to their mountain villages — that is if the locals don’t hang them from cranes and artillery barrels first.

Afghan refugees are relating tales of an increasing number of Taliban acts of banditry and rape as order collapses in the towns and cities. The wholesale kidnapping of non-Pashtun males aged between 15 and 30 for ‘military’ service smells of panic because the Taliban knows these males belong to hostile ethnic minorities. These are not the actions of men who believe in their own invincibility.

So to some Arab observers Bush has already won. But surely if bin Laden is killed other bin Laden’s will arise. There is only one bin Laden, thank God. This latter-day Mahdi is just another religious millenarian who promises paradise by driving out the infidel, the cause of the faithful’s misery. Such people have been a curse throughout history.

I’m not saying that terrorism will end with bin Laden, only that his head must be the first to roll if victory is to be achieved. Once this is done, the invisible war against terrorism will accelerate, from the freezing of bank accounts to the assassination of terrorist organizers and the smashing of their networks.

The strategy, as explained to me, is basically simple. Make an example of bin Laden, demonstrate overwhelming military power and the will to use it against states that harbor and train terrorists; isolate the terrorists physically and squeeze them psychologically. The ultimate aim is the elimination of state-sponsored terrorism.

Maybe they learned more at our colleges than we think.

They have been pretty shrewd so far in their planning:

* All attacks within minutes of each other...they knew there would be a lock-down.

* Attack on Tuesday...they knew there would be fewer passengers to resist.

* Attack female flight attendants...they knew male chivalry would draw the pilots from the cockpit.

* Use cross country flights to attack near departure site...they knew the extra fuel would provide more bang for the buck.

* Attack shortly before a full moon...conventional military wisdom favors our responding on a moonless night, which won't occur again until mid-October.

* Perhaps they realized that this is a country so paralized by Political Correctness (remember "Infinite Justice"?) that by the time we can actualy form any response, the national will for a response will be gone.

If this is truly a "War on Terrorism", then why are we waiting for irrefutable proof that Bin Laden led this one terrorist incident on September 11th?

We have proof he was ivolved with the Embassy bombings in Africa, likewise we have proof he was involved in the Cole attack. Weren't those terrorist acts?

We also have proof that the Taliban were harboring and supporting him during these previous attacks. Isn't that "harboring terrorists"? Why do the Taliban still exist?

I hope that Bin Laden is stumped, I know I am.

washi

I don't have time to track down all your lies about the Bush family, so I'll just pick the only one that comes from a reputable, non looney-left source. Junior freepers are invited to shred the others as a training exercise.

a father that was a TRAITOR to his country

I must say I especially like the way you capitalized "traitor" in hopes that it would make your claim more believable. But what does the article actually say about George Bush Sr.'s involvement in Iran-Contra?

Higher administration officials, particularly Reagan, Vice President Bush, and William J. Casey (former director of the CIA, who died in May, 1987), were implicated in some testimony, but the extent of their involvement remained unclear. North said he believed Reagan was largely aware of the secret arrangement, and the independent prosecutor's report (1994) said that Reagan and Bush had some knowledge of the affair or its coverup. Reagan and Bush both claimed to have been uninformed about the details of the affair, and no evidence was found to link them to any crime.

Note the remarkable lack of support for your charge of treason.

When I suggested your posts lack integrity I wasn't making personal remarks. I was merely stating a fact.

Still, feel free to spew more insults -- that's always a good way to win the hearts and minds of the lurkers...

(I.T.) I don't suppose you have any interest in Armand Hammer's ownership of the Gore family? Of course not.

(Bouncer) Set it out...I'm here...ain't running away from you. You picked this fight, now let's have a go.

You flatter yourself.

But, hey, we live to serve. Here's an extract from Gore: A Political Life by Bob Zelnick.

As you'll recall, Zelnick, a 21-year veteran reporter for ABC News, was summarily fired by fair-minded, caring liberals such as yourself for writing a book seen as insufficiently complimentary to Prince Albert.

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But if Albert Gore, Sr., was on the side of economic growth, some of his business acquaintances were less than savory. One of them was Armand Hammer, an entrepreneur extraordinaire with a particular talent for buying or otherwise ingratiating himself to those who could help him befriend top government decision-makers. During the early part of his career, Hammer also served as an agent of the infant Soviet Union. In his extraordinary account, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, Edward Jay Epstein documents how, during the 1920s and 1930s, Hammer—who lived in Moscow for many years—took his orders from the regimes of Lenin and Stalin. During a period when the Soviets had few diplomatic missions in the West, Hammer began by serving as a courier for the Soviets under the cover of normal business travels to and from Moscow. Hammer then graduated to more sophisticated assignments. He used his Allied American Corporation to launder Soviet funds, helped recruit Soviet spies and position them in the U.S. government, and became a key link in operations that financed Soviet espionage in London and New York. In what was perhaps his shabbiest venture, Hammer—working closely with Stalin's young aide Anastas Mikoyan—helped the Soviets sell communist-confiscated art and jewelry to the West by falsely proclaiming the items were "Romanoff treasure." In perhaps his ugliest venture, Hammer used his firm to provide a cover for the shipment of machine tools to the Soviet Union, which were then employed to help Germany circumvent Treaty of Versailles restrictions on military aircraft and weapons manufacture.

All of this was well known to the FBI, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, had kept track of Hammer for decades. But Hoover had some of Washington's most sensitive political antenna and was wary of moving publicly against Hammer so long as he appeared "protected" by powerful members of the executive or legislative branches. Hammer had enjoyed easy access to the Roosevelt Administration, but the Truman Administration, viewing him as a possible Soviet agent, kept him at arm's length, as did the Eisenhower Administration. So he developed a core of Capitol Hill allies led by Gore, Representative James Roosevelt, and Senator Styles Bridges, a conservative New Hampshire Republican. Thus insulated from FBI interference, he went about building his economic empire.

Through the 1950s and well into the following decade, Hammer counted on Gore as his principal link to the Democratic congressional leadership, and to defend his economic interests. In the early 1950s, for example, when Hammer's United Distilleries sought to lease the Army's ordnance works in Morgantown, West Virginia, in order to develop a fertilizer manufacturing operation, Hammer relied on Senator Bridges to run interference for him. When the magazine Reporter exposed Bridges' intervention, noting the irony of his alliance with a former Soviet booster, Gore took the Senate floor to defend both Hammer and Bridges. "This private citizen has had aspersions cast upon his character and his patriotism," he declared. "I could see no reason for that except as a means of attacking the senior senator from New Hampshire."

In the late 1950s Gore introduced Hammer to Senator John F. Kennedy. Hammer contributed to Kennedy's 1960 campaign and attended his inauguration as Gore's guest. During the following weeks, Kennedy discussed with Gore a report that the Soviets were employing slave labor to produce crabmeat for export. Kennedy felt he had no choice but to ban the commodity, and the controversy had become a minor irritant to already troubled U.S.-Soviet relations. Gore suggested Kennedy send Hammer to the Soviet Union to investigate the claim, which, given Hammer's background, was rather like dispatching a fox to investigate the disappearance of chickens. Nonetheless, less than a month after he took office, Kennedy had Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges name Hammer a roving economic emissary and organize an itinerary that included stops in the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, Italy, Libya, India, Japan, and the Soviet Union.

Gore wrote a letter "introducing" Hammer to Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev's deputy, Anastas Mikoyan, who had been Hammer's handler on the Romanoff art and jewelry scam three decades earlier. Mikoyan set up a February 17, 1961, meeting between Hammer and Khruschev, at which Khruschev quickly moved beyond the crabmeat issue to the general desirability of expanding trade between the two countries.

Upon his return to Washington, Hammer held meetings with both Senator Gore and Secretary Hodges. To no one's surprise, he reported finding no evidence that slave labor was used in the production of Soviet crabmeat. Even hardline Secretary of State Dean Rusk supported lifting the ban as a "tangible demonstration of our desire to improve United States-Soviet relations." Kennedy accepted the advice. In a March 17, 1961, letter to Hammer informing him of the action, Gore stated, "In the broad spectrum of the struggle to find a way for the East and the West to live in peace on one planet, this may not appear to some as a major item, but when one considers the dangers to mankind involved in war today, any step that moves toward better understanding and peaceful relations is important." By then, however, Hammer had all but forgotten the crabmeat controversy amid plans to export to the Soviet Union the machinery and know-how to begin production of massive amounts of phosphate fertilizer.

Al Gore, Sr., profited handsomely from his association with Hammer, even while still in office. By 1950 Hammer had ingratiated himself to Gore by taking him as a partner in his cattle-breeding business. He also supplied Gore with Christmas gifts of expensive silver. During the years that followed, Gore's herd of Aberdeen-Angus cattle was enriched by several bulls and heifers produced by Hammer's stock.

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Through the 1950s and well into the following decade, Hammer counted on Gore as his principal link to the Democratic congressional leadership, and to defend his economic interests.

Did someone mention the word "treason"?

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