Of bin Laden and Sun Tzu…
Brilliant punditry, slashdot-style…
“There is not a bit of evidence that Al Qaeda or any of the Islamic terrorist groups are trying to undermine America by eroding our civil liberties.”
Actually yes, there is.
As your post correctly says, it would be ridiculous to suggest they directly care about or are motivated by any issue of our civil liberties. However they do indeed consider it part of a means to an end.
From Sun Tzu’s Art of War:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Bush (and his entire administration) has a simplistic cartoon image of the enemy. The administration has declared that any coverage of what bin Laden as been saying is giving him free airtime and is giving aid to terrorists, has even played any such coverage carring coded instructions for an attack. And thus the media has been cowed into self censoring any such coverage. No coverage of what he’s actually saying and no media analysis of what he actually wants and no media analysis of the terrorist whys and hows.
This is why The War On Terror has been so badly botched. The administration has a cartoon image of the enemy, and the public has little-to-no understanding of the enemy. Bush blindly did exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do.
Why did bin Laden instigate the 9/11 attack? What was the logic behind it?
Most people can’t answer that. Saying bin Laden is evil is a hollow cartoon explanation, that evil people do evil things is a useless insightless answer. Saying “They hate our freedom” is a total fiction, a convenient administration soundbite to rally the public.
There was a chain of logic behind 9/11. It was an evil and tortured logic, but an identifiable and comprehensible logic. One must understand that logic to properly understand and fight that enemy, to understand not to unwittingly do what the enemy is hoping you to do.
First, what do bin Laden his cohorts ultimately want? What is the ultimate intent? A pan-Arab Caliphate. To unite the entire Arab world under one Islamic theocracy. That is bin Laden’s utopia, that is his perfect answer that will supposed solve all the problems he sees of the world. bin Laden fundamentally doesn’t give a shit about the Western World, he’s perfectly happy for the rest of us to (figuratively and literally) go to hell.
So bin Laden’s notion is that with the aid of Allah all Muslims should and would rise up and overthrow all of the corrupt Arab governments (and yeah those governments are generally pretty corrupt) to institute one unified Islamic rule. Of course bin Laden has gotten nowhere with that, and he decides that the only reason this plan has fails is because the Evil Western Nations have been protecting and propping up those corrupt Arab governments. And yeah, we have been protecting and propping up the Saudi Royal Family. And yeah, Saddam Hussein was all ours, he was a brutal dictator but he was a completely secular ruler and we gave him HUGE material support as a counter point to Iran. And we have been propping up other such governments for oil stability and other strategic interests. He doesn’t “hate our freedoms”, he hates us for stabilizing the Mideast and for working to keep Arab governments from collapsing in chaos, because he has the notion that such collapses and chaos would lead to an Islamic Utopia.
bin Laden’s tactical and strategic ideas are based on his Afghanistan fighting against Russia, and his view of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. His view on rallying fighters to the cause is to provoke the enemy to overreact, to provoke the enemy to brutality, so that the enemy loses support and so that the enemy creates bin Laden’s army for him. What is the purpose of the terrorist attacks on Israel? To provoke Israel to strike against the terrorists, and to provoke the inevitable incidental civilian casualties from such Israeli attacks, and to use those attacks and those Palestinian women and children casualties as propaganda to enrage the Palestinian population to join Hamas, to provoke the entire Palestinan population into an “army” dedicated to the destruction of Israel. And yes, to provoke an increasingly iron fisted domestic crackdown by the Israeli government as well.
bin Laden effectively defeated the might of the Russian army in Afghanistan with his rag-tag militia of goat herders and farmers, largely with terrorist attacks to provoke Russia to be more brutal and hated by the entire Afghani population. Hatred turning the entire population into bin Laden’s army.
bin Laden miscalculated in that 9/11 was so insanely obscene that the entire world - and even the overall Arab/Muslim public opinion - supported the invasion of Afghanistan. It didn’t create the Arab outrage, uprising, and general population army that bin Laden hoped to create. We had effectively WON the War On Terror at that point. bin Laden’s organization was destroyed, the Taliban was struck down, and the general Arab public opinion was to reject such terrorist tactics and was to oppose and turn in terrorist groups. Majority Muslims didn’t see it as a Western War Against Islam, they saw us as the Good Guys. Majority mainstream Muslims saw the Taliban and radical violent Islamists as the Bad Guys, as their own enemy. Terrorist groups don’t survive without recruits from the general population and the support and protection of the cover population. After Afghanistan the ordinary police and the general community would have hunted down and ratted out any terrorist groups and terrorist supporters.
However Bush took that victory and turned it around into defeat. Bush did exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do. Bush went ahead and became the hated villain exactly as bin Laden wanted. Bush invaded Iraq and himself fictitiously cast it as part of the War On Terror. This did fuel the propaganda line of a Western War Against The Islamic World, did fuel hatred of the US and of the West, did create the flood of support for bin Laden he wanted to created, to create the flood of fighters bin Laden wanted to create. Essentially none of the fighters in Iraq were terrorists or in any way any sort of threat before we invaded.
Obviously bin Laden’s not about to get the Islamic Utopia he imagined, but he certainly succeeded in manufacturing an Israel-Palestinian style situation of hatred and fanatical fighter recruits and creating substantial Arab community sympathy, support, and cover for such groups and for such fighters.
And in a limited sense he was sort of successful in the US domestic situation. Bush and mostly the Republican party did organize into an abusive iron fisted domestic rule, cracking down on political dissent and cracking down on civil liberties and provoking substantial unrest and even hatred against that government. However bin Laden surely doesn’t understand Democratic systems, that for use it is almost a complete non-issue for us to overthrow our own government. That it is pretty much an every day occurrence for us “overthrow” own government each election. In the 2006 election the Republican party lost many congressional seats explicitly on the issue of throwing the Bush-government out of power, and even the Republican party sees the next presidential election in terms of running away from the current administration. So in a sense bin Laden succeeded in destabilizing and toppling the current “regime” in the US, but obviously not in any way that will substantially change our support for the stability of non-Islamist governments in the Mideast.