Empire Notes

Veteran CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris, says that whenever a new communication from Osama bin Laden appears, analysts look at everything – voice, the detailed configuration of rocks and trees, you name it – except for the content, what is actually being said.

The most recent videotape is a case in point. Any time of the day, you can find feverish speculation over whether it means that he’s threatening another attack soon or whether it will affect the election.

It is true that the message contains an endorsement of Kerry, or more accurately a de-endorsement of Bush, with a litany of charges familiar from Fahrenheit 9/11 – ridiculing him for listening to The Pet Goat while the attack occurred, criticizing Bush the elder for his ties with the Saudi royal family, and attacking W. for passing the Patriot Act.

That aspect has been remarked on, but bin Laden’s main point is being ignored.

He is, ostensibly at least, speaking directly to the American people. The message is very clear. There is no talk about spreading Islamic theocracy. He says, as long as the United States create a security problem for Muslims, Americans will have a security problem. Clearly alluding to the notion that in a democratic country the people are responsible for policy, he says, "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands.”

He says that the attacks were not carried out because they hate freedom. If it was, he says, ask Bush “why we did not attack Sweden for example.” In fact, says he, “We fought you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation.”

He says also that he first thought of attacking the towers during the murderous Israeli assault on West Beirut in 1982, with, as he says, the backing of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet (near the end, the United States formally condemned the operation). Civilian areas were ceaselessly bombarded with cluster bombs and white phosphorus bombs, clear war crimes. Many thousands, mostly civilians, were killed, in that assault alone.

I’m not suggesting any naivete about bin Laden. That he wants strict Islamic states in the Middle East is clear. That he wants to take over the West is a claim for which there is no discernible evidence. The point, however, even if he is being disingenuous, is in what he chooses to say and how he appeals to his target audience.

Perform for a minute the difficult task of imagining yourself to be an Arab living in one of these subjugated countries, and try to analyze what bin Laden is saying from that perspective. All of it sounds reasonable. If the United States and Israel attack us, we’ll attack them. If they kill large numbers of civilians during the attack, we’re allowed to do the same. They talk about freedom but support despotism here and in their own country. If they stop attacking us and trying to rule us, we’ll stop attacking them. It’s difficult to argue with any of this, from that perspective.

The argument that when we attack civilian areas we don’t intend to kill the civilians but that the other side does doesn’t get very far – especially when there have been so many policies, from the Israeli closures to the sanctions on Iraq, that directly target civilians. Scheuer mentions the case of a cleric in Saudi Arabia asked by bin Laden to render an opinion on the justness of using weapons of mass destruction against civilians. In 40 pages of careful reasoning from Islamic law and precedent, the cleric comes up with precisely the Pentagon doctrine of collateral damage – such attacks are justified as long as killing the civilians is not your primary purpose.

By contrast, look at Bush and Kerry’s pronouncements. Kerry’s response yesterday was, "They are barbarians, I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes.” Arabs know what “stop at nothing” means – the bombing of Beirut, the Highway of Death in the Gulf War, the sanctions, the daily Israeli assaults on Palestinians, the occupation that has caused, according to an article in the Lancet, 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq. It would be nice to have at least one political leader who understood the importance of reaching out and appealing to the Arab world, instead of engaging in cheap political grandstanding.