There's menace in Osama's
message By Michael Scheuer
The September 7 release of a new video
statement by Osama bin Laden puts to rest, at
least for now, widespread speculation that he is
dead, retired or has been pushed aside by his
deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri [1].
With a
newly trimmed and dyed beard, comfortable robes
rather than a camouflage jacket, and a clear and
patient speaking style, bin Laden achieved a major
purpose of his speech before he said
a
word: he clearly showed Muslims and Americans that
he was still alive, that he was healthy and not at
death's door, that he spoke from secure
surroundings unthreatened by the US-led coalition
in Afghanistan, and that he, al-Qaeda and their
allies were ready to continue the war.
As
usual, this message was wrapped in an as-Sahab
Productions video displaying high-level production
values [2]. Some of the substance of bin Laden's
speech was partially new to him specifically, but
the West's failure to analyze what he and his
lieutenants have been talking about for the past
few years was repeatedly displayed by such foreign
policy experts as a former deputy director of the
Central Intelligence Agency and New York Times
journalist David Brooks, both of whom suggested
that bin Laden sounded like a left-wing, 1960s
Marxist blogger.
The Islamist expert Walid
Phares even described him as "Trotskyite".
Speeches by bin Laden and other senior al-Qaeda
leaders are intended to have an accumulating
impact; that is, most of their major speeches and
statements build on those that have preceded them
over the past decade. Bin Laden and his associates
assume, perhaps incorrectly, that their Western
foes will not treat each statement, speech and
interview as an isolated and unconnected event.
The commentators mentioned above and many
other pundits - both right and left on the
political spectrum - have described bin Laden's
speech as something new and a blatant attempt to
remain relevant in the contemporary world. That is
incorrect. Bin Laden has talked previously on
numerous occasions about the negative factors of
capitalism and the inequities and fragility of the
US economy; many of his post-September 11, 2001,
speeches featured his bleed-America-to-bankruptcy
scheme, as did several of his interviews before
September 11.
In addition, Zawahiri and
Azzam al-Amriki (the US citizen Adam Gadahn) have
repeatedly spoken in detail about these themes
[3]. Indeed, Zawahiri's extensive February 2005
essay, entitled "The Freeing of Humanity and
Homelands Under the Banner of the Koran", marked
the start of al-Qaeda's now well-developed
campaign of trying to support and deepen already
existing anti-Americanism among non-Muslim groups
- such as anti-globalists, environmentalists,
nuclear disarmament activists, anti-US Europeans
and other "oppressed people".
These two
men also have focused on the imperfect state of
black-white race relations in the United States
and championed the Islamic ideas of Malcolm X. And
bin Laden - possibly for the first time - hit on
this theme in his September 7 statement. "It is
more severe than what the slaves used to suffer at
your hands centuries ago," bin Laden said
regarding conditions for white and especially
black US soldiers in Iraq. "And it is as if some
of them have gone from one slavery to another more
severe and harmful, even if it be in the fancy
dress of the Defense Department's financial
enticements" [4].
Western officials and
journalists have also concluded that there is no
"overt threat" in bin Laden's new message. Unless
these experts truly believe that at some point in
time bin Laden is going to explicitly state the
time and location of an attack, it is hard to
understand how they came to that conclusion. If
Americans do not convert to Islam, said bin Laden
- and he probably is not expecting many takers -
our duty "is to continue to escalate the killing
and fighting against you".
That seems a
clear threat. Moreover, bin Laden's prolonged
discussion of his conversion offer is also clearly
threatening in that it is an action demanded by
the Prophet Muhammad of Muslims before they attack
their enemy. As for another pre-attack requirement
- multiple warnings - Zawahiri and Gadahn have
fired a great number of warnings at the United
States this year.
Finally, the new
message's text and bin Laden's dyed beard seems to
have persuaded some Western commentators to
superimpose their fascination with celebrities and
egos onto bin Laden. Since September 7, for
example, Harvard's Noah Feldman - among others -
described bin Laden's cleaned-up personal
appearance and the text of his statement as an
effort by the al-Qaeda chief to put himself in a
position to claim that "I was responsible for the
American disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan,"
attributing a huge dose of egotism to bin Laden's
performance.
In reviewing the tape, such
egotism is hard to find. The first person "I" is
used by bin Laden as a necessary part of his offer
to Americans to convert to Islam. He makes himself
a central player only because he is volunteering
to guide Americans to Allah. Asking Americans to
"lend me your ears" to hear God's message and then
saying "I invite you to embrace Islam" constitute
the role bin Laden lays out for himself in this
speech.
This point is made not to argue
whether or not bin Laden is egotistical, but to
suggest that it would be unwise to believe that
our seemingly inevitable withdrawals from Iraq and
Afghanistan will be seen by Muslims or identified
by al-Qaeda's chief as victories for bin Laden.
Instead, they will be seen by Muslims and
publicized by bin Laden - as he did after the
Afghans' 1989 defeat of the Soviets - as victories
for Allah and Islam; al-Qaeda will give the major
portion of credit to Iraqi and Afghan mujahideen.
It is imperative, from bin Laden's
perspective, that Muslims worldwide see US
disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan as Allah-granted
victories for Islam and faithful Muslims. This
perspective of "God's victory" will further erode
defeatism in the Muslim world and galvanize far
more support for the jihad than any bin Laden
claim of glory for al-Qaeda's efforts. Indeed,
such a claim would undercut much of what bin Laden
has accomplished, and he knows it.
Notes 1. Osama bin
Laden, "The Solution," as-Sahab Productions,
September 7, 2007. It is worth noting that bin
Laden also spoke in the plain and direct manner of
his pre-US presidential election speech of October
2004. The September 7 speech was without lengthy
quotations from the Quran, stories from Islamic
history, or quotations from the Hadith.
Interestingly, at the end of the talk he drew the
attention of Christians to the similar beliefs
that they and Muslims share regarding Jesus and
his mother Mary, and railed against what he called
"the fabrications of the Jews" against Mary.
Having previously railed against Christians as the
"crusaders of the cross," this passage is
something of an anomaly for bin Laden. 2. When
bin Laden did speak, the substance of his talk
demonstrated that he is still what Peter Bergen
and Peter Arnett have described as a "news
junkie", and that he is completely capable of
sating his desire by following the adventures of
US interest rates and mortgage defaults while
likely inhabiting the terrain of Pakistan's
North-West Frontier. 3. Two of al-Qaeda's
post-September 11 electronic journals - al-Nida
and al-Ansar - also published several analytical
essays on these issues. 4. It seems fair to
conclude that the American citizen Adam Gadahn has
contributed to broadening al-Qaeda commentary
vis-a-vis US economic and social affairs. Born and
reared by parents who propounded the beliefs of
the US "hippy generation" that came of age in the
1960s, Gadahn may well have imbibed an animus
against capitalism and a taste for analyzing US
history via the purported conspiracies of
capitalists. These seem to have seeped into bin
Laden's rather overdone criticism of capitalism.
That said, the critique of capitalism in bin
Laden's new message and other statements by
Zawahiri and Gadahn have less to do with the
traditional leftist-socialist description of
capitalism's evils and inevitable demise, and more
to do with emphasizing the ability of Islam to
rectify societal evils, promote social and
economic equality and even lower taxes to a limit
"totaling 2.5%".
Michael Scheuer
served as the chief of the bin Laden Unit at the
Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorist
Center from 1996 to 1999. He is now a senior
fellow at The Jamestown Foundation.
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