Posted on 10/07/2001 3:57:41 PM PDT by ouroboros
Special Edition
October 7, 2001
As US missiles rained down on Afghanistan, the chilling voice of Osama bin Laden, carried by Aljazeera television in Qatar, rang out over Western airwaves, directly addressing Americans as well as his fellow Muslims: "America," he said, "is full of fear from its north to its south," and Americans "will never feel safe until we and the Palestinians feel safe." "It’s greatest buildings are destroyed," he hissed, agreeing with Jerry Falwell that "here is America struck by God Almighty," and adding that "America is tasting now only a copy of what we have tasted."
In what amounts to an open admission of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden wrapped his monstrous confession in the rhetoric of vengeance, in effect saying: feel our pain. He is claiming the right of retaliation when he says "Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated." In this first fusillade in the propaganda war, bin Laden used all the weapons at his disposal. "A million innocent children are dying at this time as we speak," he said, "killed in Iraq without any guilt." An American reporter, Leslie Stahl, brought this issue up to then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright in an infamous 1996 interview:
Leslie Stahl: "We have heard that a half million children have died (as a result of sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."
~ Sixty Minutes, May 12, 1996
To win the war on terrorism, the US is going to have to come up with a different answer than the one offered by Mad Madeleine.
"Israeli tanks rampage across Palestine," continued bin Laden, his soft voice and gentle eyes a bizarre counterpoint to the unrelenting harshness of his message. The voice of pure evil, and a very effective evil – one that contains within it a grain of truth: Israeli tanks barrel into "Ramallah, Rafah and Beit Jala and many other parts of the land of Islam, and we do not hear anyone raising his voice or reacting. But when the sword fell upon America after 80 years, hypocrisy raised its head up high bemoaning those killers who toyed with the blood, honor and sanctities of Muslims." Here he is speaking directly to the Arab "street," while also taunting his Western enemies: he scores points with the former by not only pointing out the hypocrisy of the West, but also in holding it accountable.
The Bush administration knows how very effective this line of argument is in the Middle East: the appeal of bin Laden’s message goes way beyond the ultra-fundamentalist faction of Islam represented by the Taliban. No wonder Colin Powell is putting pressure on the Qatari authorities to close down Aljazeera TV, ironically one of the few freewheeling and uncensored media outlets in the region.
This unusual broadcast by bin Laden clarifies two issues beyond any possibility of doubt:
1) The Al Qaeda terror network and Osama bin Laden personally are responsible for the 9/11 atrocity, and the US is fully justified in going after them and ripping up this order of assassins root and branch.
2) In order to win the war against terrorism, America will have to change its foreign policy. If the Bush administration is now engaged in an effort to win over Muslim hearts and minds, then a wide-ranging review of US policy perspectives in the Middle East is in order. Unconditional support not only for Israel but for the decadent and tottering Saudi regime – everything must be put on the table.
The Ladenite declaration of war – clearly made before the US military assault – also clarifies the role and program of the peace party: to limit this war as much as possible. Excluding pure pacifists, non-interventionists can make only one argument against this war: that it will have the exact opposite of its intended consequences, and that therefore American war aims must be narrowly focused on the elimination of the terrorist threat. A just war against bin Laden and Al Qaeda could easily escalate into a broader, regional war – and then the world war metaphor so beloved by our pro-war intellectuals and pundits in the cheering section would become a grisly, bloody, futile reality.
Our argument against that kind of war is simple: it is not in America’s interest to take on the entire Muslim world. That the Bush administration agrees with this perspective is underscored by the Powellian strategy of building a broad coalition including Arab countries – an effort which so enraged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that he grotesquely likened it to Munich! Naturally, the Israelis are pursuing their own national interest, and one reason many Americans admire Sharon is that he does this so doggedly and unrelentingly. On the other hand, it is neither surprising nor any less admirable when an American President and his secretary of state pursue the same policy on behalf of our own nation.
The worst case scenario is a war, a world war, pitting the US and Israel against the world’s Muslims, and a good deal of the rest. Yet that is the war that is coming, unless principled non-interventionists unite around a program of limited war aims. "Peace now" is no longer a viable option, but, then again, neither is perpetual war.
Retaliation, yes – occupation, no! That must be the battle-cry of the noninterventionist movement as we face a new challenge to our analysis. For once, America is fighting a defensive war, a just war – at least, so far. But it is an almost effortless transition from a just war to a war of conquest, so that most never notice when that point has been passed and there’s no turning back. Already the President has alluded to the postwar reconstruction of Afghanistan as comparable to the rebuilding – and occupation – of Japan and Germany. Of course, US soldiers are still occupying Germany and Japan, and the question is: will they be occupying Afghanistan 60 years after an American "victory." That would be a Pyhrric victory indeed, one that recalls the statement of old King Pyhrrus: "One more ‘victory’ such as this and we are finished."
What makes this the "land of Islam"?
Is it so because Moslems live there?
Are Jersey City and Brooklyn part of the "land of Islam"?
The Coalition, whatever it looks like as time goes on, will have its boot on the necks of several terrorist-sponsoring states for the forseeable future, if they don't get the message that they've got to stand down from harboring these cretins.
There's going to be a shift in power, with Russia clearly on the side of the U.S. and Europe. It's hardly the U.S. and Israel alone, no matter how much you try to characterize it as such.
No. The radical Muslims will continue to demonstrate how much of a threat they are to civilization, and even the Saudis and Egyptians will do what they have to do to rid their countries of the scum.
"These people", as you call them, never said to do nothing. This column is perfectly consistent with Raimondo's previous work.
I wonder how much this one sentence got played up in the Islamic press.
She really blew it with this one.
I strongly disagree with the idea of changing our foreign policy as a result of these attacks. Below are the reasons why:
We must hang tough, and hang together. Or we will surely hang separately.
Good post. Justin hits the nail on the head. Taking on the entire Muslim world would be an idiocy of collosal and bloody proportions. Yet that is what some laptop warriors in the press, among them the saber rattlers at National Review, The Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, are advocating.
We need to punish those responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist massacre. But we don't need to engage in nation building in a faraway land whose proud people will view us unwelcomed occupiers. We also need to get our damned troops out of Saudi Arabia and inform Israel that we're cutting off their $3 billion-a-year handout. Israel's decision in 1947 to steal Palestinian lands and force their inhabitants into separate, but unequal, non-Jewish districts is their problem, not ours.
- Un-PC
By the way, as a taxpayer, I'm sick and tired of handing over $3 billion a year to this perpetual welfare case. Let them run their "democracy" with their own money.
- Un-PC.
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