What the Heck is Bin Laden's Game Plan???

[silver 2039]

Den Valdron is Bin Laden clearly.

 

[Riffraff]

Den Valdron is Bin Laden clearly.

yeah and if he isn't, he should be

Nah seriously, good posts often end discussions and thus threads...

 

[GenMarshall]

I think his game plain is to confuse the Americans so he sneeks away like a shrew he is.

 

[amadeus]

Discussion over?

Not necessarily. Your views are so ridiculous radical that there is no amount of evidence in existence to make you change your mind.

If a man claims that his father was a parakeet and sincerely believes so, is there really any way to convince him otherwise? Or is it possible that he is so out of his mind that trying to reason with him would be nothing but an exercise in futility?

 

[bathsheba666]

I am quite certain that CIA and USA political analysts know Bin Ladens plans anyway. Bin Laden has lost the first round of the war against USA by failing to re-create the Sovjet/Mujahedin situation in Afghanistas as they planned. They are also on the path downwards in Iraq and they know it. Going out public against Israel and connecting it to Iraq is just a desperate try to justify the war on Iraqis and Americans in Iraq as muslims are turning it back to it I would guess. Israel is still an enemy of Islam, but the hate towards it probably isn't strong enough to make people fight USA and the goverment in Iraq as it was earlier.

He's an opportunist. But really, what did you expect from bin Laden?

You know, every time we get all worked up about what Bin Laden says. He's probably sitting in some cave watching CNN and giggling with masked men that we actually take each and every one of his random and inane ramblings with so much seriousness.

Bin Laden? The guy still matters?

The old fart is just grasping at straws. We should find him and put sign/warning on him "Do not take this crackpot seriously"

Interesting. Hold up the mirror...

Substitute Bush for Bin Laden, and it all makes an equal amount of sense.

 

[Gooblah]

The thing is, there really isn't much he can do these days. If he's in between Afghanistan and Pakistan, one side of his tunnel is getting the crap bombed out of it. The other is a new zone for the Taliban, but the Pakistani elections have shown the people aren't exactly sympathetic to his cause....

I think this clip shows what he likes to do at times like these...

 

[Den Valdron]

In the words of the great Lord John Worfen, aka Emilio Lizardo, "Laugh while you can, Monkey-boys."

The thing is, that if you look at it from Bin Laden's point of view, he's winning... big time. How much damage did his 9/11 strike do to the American economy? A trillion? Throw in these two wars, that's another three trillion down the drain long term. If they go another five years, factor in at least another three trillion, and the bills are going to be coming due. National debt's already pushing up to 10 trillion. Remember how the Russian economy went bust... and how Afghanistan was the straw that broke the camel's back?

Bin Laden looks out, and he sees his hated enemy, Saddam destroyed, and America preparing to do his work, destroying the Assads in Syria and the apostates in Iran. He sees America failing and floundering in Afghanistan and Iraq. He sees no one selling Pervez Mushareff life insurance in Pakistan.

He didn't expect to live this long. But dying was just the cost of his dream. Every day he gets up... and he smells victory. Bush is doing everything Bin Laden wants, the way Bin Laden wants it done.

 

[Cannae]

You know, every time we get all worked up about what Bin Laden says. He's probably sitting in some cave watching CNN and giggling with masked men that we actually take each and every one of his random and inane ramblings with so much seriousness.

QFT, actually I wouldn't be surprised if the leaders of the west don't want him to be dead. Think about it, he is way too useful as a propaganda tool for the right winger to want to get rid of him.

 

[BasketCase]

Bush is doing everything Bin Laden wants, the way Bin Laden wants it done.

You're assuming you know what Bin Laden actually wants.

He said in one of his tapes, after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that his goal had been to draw the U.S. into a long and wearying war that would bankrupt it. Basically he was acting like that kid on the schoolground who keeps going "ha ha, I wanted you to do that". Why don't you go back and re-read the OP again--you do not give away your secret plans.

 

[Winner]

I'll say right up front that I've got no damn idea.

Alrightey, have fun.

Basically, they have no realistic plans. They're religious fanatics, what did you expect?

They believe that by attacking the West and Israel, they will win popular support and radicalize (Sunni) Muslims who will then revolt and estabilish Islamic theocracies across the Middle East. Then they'll use this "base of operations" to spread Islam until the entire planet is one big Islamic Caliphate

 

[bathsheba666]

He said in one of his tapes, after the U.S. invaded Iran, that his goal had been to draw the U.S. into a long and wearying war that would bankrupt it. Basically he was acting like that kid on the schoolground who keeps going "ha ha, I wanted you to do that". Why don't you go back and re-read the OP again--you do not give away your secret plans.

Well, ermmm, let me see...

Acting like a kid in the schoolground seems proportionate if the enemy (guess who?) is acting the same way.

If there is no need for your plans to remain secret, why not share them?

And if you can rely on your enemy to act in a way that fits right in to your plans
.....and you can rely on his stupidity to continue this tack
.....why not share this with the rest of he world so they can enjoy the joke.

Of course, everyone knows that the fact that the US...
... has been embroiled for years now,
... and has spent billions going on trillions
in no way fits a profile of "bankrupt after a wearying war"


Why don't you go back and read the OP again?

 

[Verbose]

OSAMA BIN LADEN'S GAME PLAN

(take notes, Kiddies)

Osama looks out over the Muslim world and he finds it offensive. He remembers a glorious history where the faithful went out and literally conquered half the world overnight, fighting their way through Asia, Africa and even Europe. Creating the Caliphate, the Mogul Empire in India, even the Ottoman Turks. Great works were built everywhere. He remembers these as a golden era of faith, when Muslims were truly Muslims, Allah loved them, and rewarded them. Keep this in mind. History for Osama is not just a bunch of old farts who don't matter any more, and its not what Britney did with Lynsey Lohan's lipstick last week. History, a version of history, is a crucial part of both Osama's world view and his motivations.

Then Osama looks out over the current Arab world. What does he see? Poverty, misery, failure everywhere. They spend all their money on weapons, but they can't win a war. They can't build roads. They can't do anything. Arab rulers like the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families are corrupt, using their wealth to pamper themselves and buy off their people. Other Arabs have tried to overcome corruption, but at the cost of selling their souls - Saddam, Sadat, Mubarak, Quaddafi, the Assads. None of these are good Muslims, rather, they're trying to be westerners, dressing up in suits and ties or army fatigues, renouncing their culture and the sources of their actual strength. The Arab world is Earth's scrotum, it's smelly, hairy, wrinkled, dangling and oversensitive. Once the Arabs were the center of the world, now they're its hind quarters. This is also an important part of Bin Laden's world view.

Okay, so what's wrong? There are two problems. The big problem as Bin Laden and the Taliban saw it is that Allah had withheld his favour (these guys have a lot in common with Jerry Falwell). Muslims have become lazy, weak, corrupt, they've lost their faith. So Allah turns his face away, and misfortune plagues them.

So the key is to get Muslims to be good Muslims again. Believe it or not, this was the entirety of the Taliban's approach to government. They thought that as long as God was displeased, nothing else was going to work. And if you made God happy, the rest of the stuff... the actual nuts and bolts of government, would just naturally take care of itself. So they were out there trying to force people to be Good muslims.

This is also the song that most of the fundamentalist muslims (and christians) sing. The world sucks and your misfortunes are a result of your not being sufficiently faithful. If you only got back to God, it would work out.

In this sense, Osama sees Israel and America as Gods wake up call to the people of Islam. Sort of a slap upside the head as you were.

But here's where it gets interesting. He also sees America and Israel as meddling in Arab society and government. He sees these powers as agents of corruption, propping up corrupt despots like the Saudi royals, impoverishing people with sanctions, making occasional wars upon them, using economic tools to prey upon them, and using cultural warfare like pornography, clothes, fashion, drugs, television, etc. The Far enemy uses its distance to put Muslims at their ease and uses lies and seduction.

Islam must be restored, but Bin Laden and most fundamentalists sees two enemies: The 'Near Enemy' - Saddam, Mubarak, Shiites, the House of Saud. The 'Far Enemy' Israel and America.

Now, among radicals like Bin Laden, the big argument has always been strategy. Who do you attack first? The Near Enemy or the Far Enemy. If you can defeat the Near Enemy, then the Far Enemy will become irrelevant, or at least easier to challenge. The real goal is always to restore Islamic society.

The big victory and the big failure of the 'Near' approach was the Taliban. Sure, they took over an entire country and began to enact their Islamic paradise. On the other hand, they proved to be total screwups, petty and inept boobs. The Islamic world got a good look at the kind of society the fundamentalists wanted to build.... and they didn't like it at all.

The big victory of the far approach was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the biggest most aggressive empire ever, its military forces were unstoppable. And yet, a handful of ragged Mujahedeen with nothing but their faiths, their flip flops and their AK's stopped them cold and eventually destroyed the evil Empire.

(Okay, the US may have had something to do with it, but Bin Laden finds it easy to overlook that)

Local corruption is too entrenched, the Muslims have become too lazy, too divided. They need an outside force to unite them. They need to be shown.

So here's Bin Laden's great idea: Let's do Afganistan/USSR all over again. Let's force the FAR ENEMY to come here among us Muslims, so we can unite to fight the infidel, and in doing so, rediscover our true nature. And this time, we'll keep it.

So, here was his Master Plan. Strike a brutal blow against the FAR ENEMY. Force it to show its true nature by coming and invading an Islamic country like Afghanistan. And then bleed it to death, while rallying the faithful. Without the far enemy to prop them up, the corrupt regimes will fail, and the faithful will sweep all before them.

Thus, 9/11.

Bin Laden wanted the US in Afghanistan, it was precisely part of his plans. It was to create a battlefield to kill another superpower, and spread the seed of Islamic revolution. He didn't quite get what he wanted. The US went light, minimal presence, and worked heavily through the northern Alliance.

In Iraqi he got a twofer. Not only one of his most hated Near Enemies destroyed, but the Far Enemy in the heart of the Muslim world, rather than a remote provincial backwater. As far as Bin Laden was concerned, Iraq was perfect. Afghanistan, Saddam and Iraq was Bin Laden's trifecta.

America's threats against Iran and Syria are another bit twofer. He hates both of these regimes as apostate. It's all part of purifying the Islamic world and uniting it against the common enemy.

Right now, he thinks its working out swimmingly. Terrific. Great. He thinks he's winning.

He's playing a long game. He doesn't expect to live to see the end of it. It might be the next generation, or the one after that.

But he believes in the end, America will fall, Israel will vanish, the corrupt petty governments imposed upon the Muslim people will be swept away, and Allah shall smile upon his people.

Good summary, one thing to add — partly to Winner, to point out that there are rational elements intermixed with the religious wishful-thinking:

There's also the last twenty years of history of radical political Islam to consider. Basically it started as a political ideology of terrorism pretty similar to European Marxist urban guerillas in the 1970's, and the hot-spot was Algeria.

Then, back in the 80's, the idea was to attack representatives of government institutions, that would force a backlash against these faithful Muslims fighting the western corruption of (gasp, horror) having a state and playing politics. That backlash would then outrage you average Muslim to such an extent, they would rise against the corrupt state, and Islam would reign supreme, issuing in a new Golden Age Caliphate. (This is where the reasoning was similar to Marxist urban guerillas; just substitute Muslim masses rising for proletarian masses, and Caliphate for the "dictature of the proletariat").

Except, just like the Marxist terrorists discovered, your average person doesn't want government and politics abolished, but better, less corrupt, government and politics. They didn't rise in disgust and overthrow anything, instead they became mostly disgusted with radial political Islam. Which is where the mechanisms of Islamist terror diverged from Marxist terror. The Marxists gave up eventually, when the people didn't rally to them. The Islamists, the hard-cases at least, decided that if all these Bad Muslims refuse to become Good Muslims, they are part of the problem alongside things like western-style government and politics. So they have to be killed... Simple as that. Enter the Algerian bloody civil war situation.

But that is a really bad situation to be in for anyone aspiring to lead a lofty Muslim resurgence against general godlessness. If the Faithful are busy killing other Muslims for being bad Muslims, instead of attacking the political situation that started out as the main target, there's really no way of ralling the Muslim population in general.

And this was where al-Zawahiri, the ideologue behind the banker bin-Ladin, came up with the plan to short-out this political impass by kicking the conflict up to a higher level, by attacking the US to bring it to the Middle East, to bring the Far Enemy to the Muslim lands.

And it worked, sort of. Bin-Ladin's expectation was for Afghanistan to be the battlefield, but then the seven kinds of snot him and his men had beaten out of them was beyond what they had expected. They actually lost in Afghanistan. Intercepted radio messages from bin-Ladin show that in the end he was apologising to his followers for having led them into a situation that had turned out to be a death-trap.

But then the US invaded Iraq, and suddenly the plan to fight the US at home, as a means of uniting all Muslims against it, got a new lease on life. That was unexpected, and an unnecessary free ride for the al-Q. That's not to say bin-Ladin himself controls anything. These days he seems mostly a symbolic figurehead, and the al-Qaeda a "franchise". If you're a (Sunni) Islamist terror-group enywhere in the Middle East, you want the al-Q brand on your operations, so you negotiate a deal with the "franchise" to get to call yourself that.

From what has been gleaned about the inner workings of al-Q in Iraq, it's the local commanders calling the shots, and an internal conflict between the local people on the ground, and bin-Ladin and Zawahiri, has been over whether one targets Iraqi civilians or not.
Clearly the al-Q in Iraq does this, but that is exactly how Islamist terrorism shot itself in the foot in Algeria, and precisely the kind of impass that Zawahiri and bin-Ladin came up with 9/11 to try to get out of. Attitude polling in Iraq would seem to bear out the correctness of their analysis of this: the US is pretty generally detested, but it scores way better than the Islamist terrorists, precisely because the latter are a bloody menace to the life and security of ordinary people. That's Algeria all over.

As to whether bin-Ladin things he's winning or not, well, one cannot fight God, who is all powerful, so to bin-Ladin's mind God is always winning. Whether he is perplexed by some of the twists and turns of that process, I don't think we can know. We can expect him to expect it will all come right in the end, God willing.

 

[BasketCase]

Acting like a kid in the schoolground seems proportionate if the enemy (guess who?) is acting the same way.

And that "enemy" would be who? I'm guessing George Bush. Dubya is not going "ha ha, we wanted you to to do that". Dubya is going "ha ha, we KILLED YOU". Huge difference.

If there is no need for your plans to remain secret, why not share them?

We invade Iraq. Osama goes "ha ha, my plan was to drag you into Iraq and keep you here". Then, what if the U.S. deposes Saddam and leaves immediately (which is pretty much the worst possible outcome for you)? If that happened, Osama's plan would be ruined. He can't take that risk. The plan needs to be secret. Therefore, either (1) dragging us into Iraq was not his plan, or (2) Osama is monumentally stupid.

It is one of these two. Which one?

 

[Verbose]

We invade Iraq. Osama goes "ha ha, my plan was to drag you into Iraq and keep you here". Then, what if the U.S. deposes Saddam and leaves immediately (which is pretty much the worst possible outcome for you)? If that happened, Osama's plan would be ruined. He can't take that risk. The plan needs to be secret. Therefore, either (1) dragging us into Iraq was not his plan, or (2) Osama is monumentally stupid.

It is one of these two. Which one?

Neither.

1) Bin-Ladin had nothing to do with the US getting into Iraq. That was a pure, unexpected bonus for him after the Afghanistan debacle, which was where he wanted to drag the US in. There was no way he could plan Iraq.

2) He is an Instrument of God. As such, though he is convinced he knows God's will in general, we mortals aren't usually privy to the exact way God's plans will be brough to fruition.

 

[BasketCase]

Neither.

1) Bin-Ladin had nothing to do with the US getting into Iraq.

That falls under "dragging us into Iraq was not his plan".

 

[bigdog5994]

OSAMA BIN LADEN'S GAME PLAN

(take notes, Kiddies)

Osama looks out over the Muslim world and he finds it offensive. He remembers a glorious history where the faithful went out and literally conquered half the world overnight, fighting their way through Asia, Africa and even Europe. Creating the Caliphate, the Mogul Empire in India, even the Ottoman Turks. Great works were built everywhere. He remembers these as a golden era of faith, when Muslims were truly Muslims, Allah loved them, and rewarded them. Keep this in mind. History for Osama is not just a bunch of old farts who don't matter any more, and its not what Britney did with Lynsey Lohan's lipstick last week. History, a version of history, is a crucial part of both Osama's world view and his motivations.

Then Osama looks out over the current Arab world. What does he see? Poverty, misery, failure everywhere. They spend all their money on weapons, but they can't win a war. They can't build roads. They can't do anything. Arab rulers like the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families are corrupt, using their wealth to pamper themselves and buy off their people. Other Arabs have tried to overcome corruption, but at the cost of selling their souls - Saddam, Sadat, Mubarak, Quaddafi, the Assads. None of these are good Muslims, rather, they're trying to be westerners, dressing up in suits and ties or army fatigues, renouncing their culture and the sources of their actual strength. The Arab world is Earth's scrotum, it's smelly, hairy, wrinkled, dangling and oversensitive. Once the Arabs were the center of the world, now they're its hind quarters. This is also an important part of Bin Laden's world view.

Okay, so what's wrong? There are two problems. The big problem as Bin Laden and the Taliban saw it is that Allah had withheld his favour (these guys have a lot in common with Jerry Falwell). Muslims have become lazy, weak, corrupt, they've lost their faith. So Allah turns his face away, and misfortune plagues them.

So the key is to get Muslims to be good Muslims again. Believe it or not, this was the entirety of the Taliban's approach to government. They thought that as long as God was displeased, nothing else was going to work. And if you made God happy, the rest of the stuff... the actual nuts and bolts of government, would just naturally take care of itself. So they were out there trying to force people to be Good muslims.

This is also the song that most of the fundamentalist muslims (and christians) sing. The world sucks and your misfortunes are a result of your not being sufficiently faithful. If you only got back to God, it would work out.

In this sense, Osama sees Israel and America as Gods wake up call to the people of Islam. Sort of a slap upside the head as you were.

But here's where it gets interesting. He also sees America and Israel as meddling in Arab society and government. He sees these powers as agents of corruption, propping up corrupt despots like the Saudi royals, impoverishing people with sanctions, making occasional wars upon them, using economic tools to prey upon them, and using cultural warfare like pornography, clothes, fashion, drugs, television, etc. The Far enemy uses its distance to put Muslims at their ease and uses lies and seduction.

Islam must be restored, but Bin Laden and most fundamentalists sees two enemies: The 'Near Enemy' - Saddam, Mubarak, Shiites, the House of Saud. The 'Far Enemy' Israel and America.

Now, among radicals like Bin Laden, the big argument has always been strategy. Who do you attack first? The Near Enemy or the Far Enemy. If you can defeat the Near Enemy, then the Far Enemy will become irrelevant, or at least easier to challenge. The real goal is always to restore Islamic society.

The big victory and the big failure of the 'Near' approach was the Taliban. Sure, they took over an entire country and began to enact their Islamic paradise. On the other hand, they proved to be total screwups, petty and inept boobs. The Islamic world got a good look at the kind of society the fundamentalists wanted to build.... and they didn't like it at all.

The big victory of the far approach was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the biggest most aggressive empire ever, its military forces were unstoppable. And yet, a handful of ragged Mujahedeen with nothing but their faiths, their flip flops and their AK's stopped them cold and eventually destroyed the evil Empire.

(Okay, the US may have had something to do with it, but Bin Laden finds it easy to overlook that)

Local corruption is too entrenched, the Muslims have become too lazy, too divided. They need an outside force to unite them. They need to be shown.

So here's Bin Laden's great idea: Let's do Afganistan/USSR all over again. Let's force the FAR ENEMY to come here among us Muslims, so we can unite to fight the infidel, and in doing so, rediscover our true nature. And this time, we'll keep it.

So, here was his Master Plan. Strike a brutal blow against the FAR ENEMY. Force it to show its true nature by coming and invading an Islamic country like Afghanistan. And then bleed it to death, while rallying the faithful. Without the far enemy to prop them up, the corrupt regimes will fail, and the faithful will sweep all before them.

Thus, 9/11.

Bin Laden wanted the US in Afghanistan, it was precisely part of his plans. It was to create a battlefield to kill another superpower, and spread the seed of Islamic revolution. He didn't quite get what he wanted. The US went light, minimal presence, and worked heavily through the northern Alliance.

In Iraqi he got a twofer. Not only one of his most hated Near Enemies destroyed, but the Far Enemy in the heart of the Muslim world, rather than a remote provincial backwater. As far as Bin Laden was concerned, Iraq was perfect. Afghanistan, Saddam and Iraq was Bin Laden's trifecta.

America's threats against Iran and Syria are another bit twofer. He hates both of these regimes as apostate. It's all part of purifying the Islamic world and uniting it against the common enemy.

Right now, he thinks its working out swimmingly. Terrific. Great. He thinks he's winning.

He's playing a long game. He doesn't expect to live to see the end of it. It might be the next generation, or the one after that.

But he believes in the end, America will fall, Israel will vanish, the corrupt petty governments imposed upon the Muslim people will be swept away, and Allah shall smile upon his people.

beautifully done do you teach classes or something?

 

[bathsheba666]

And that "enemy" would be who? I'm guessing George Bush. Dubya is not going "ha ha, we wanted you to to do that". Dubya is going "ha ha, we KILLED YOU". Huge difference.

Of course, the YOU in 'we KILLED YOU' is hardly likely to be in a position to hear this very well, if the sentence is correct. But this would fit with the general level of analysis in the Bush camp.

And I'm hardly surprised to find you think the Bush level of discourse fits right into that previously despised playground. So, no real difference.

We invade Iraq. Osama goes "ha ha, my plan was to drag you into Iraq and keep you here". Then, what if the U.S. deposes Saddam and leaves immediately (which is pretty much the worst possible outcome for you)? If that happened, Osama's plan would be ruined. He can't take that risk. The plan needs to be secret. Therefore, either (1) dragging us into Iraq was not his plan, or (2) Osama is monumentally stupid.

It is one of these two. Which one?

Hey, I ordered a hamburger.

How about: Bush is monumentally stupid?

And, how about: you can't see this?

Precis:
OBL: "Hey Bush, nyah-nyah-na-nyah-nyah"
GWB: "OK, I'm going to rush into the playground at a different school. Ha, that showed you"

 

[Den Valdron]

You're assuming you know what Bin Laden actually wants.

He said in one of his tapes, after the U.S. invaded [/B]Iran[/B], that his goal had been to draw the U.S. into a long and wearying war that would bankrupt it. Basically he was acting like that kid on the schoolground who keeps going "ha ha, I wanted you to do that". Why don't you go back and re-read the OP again--you do not give away your secret plans.

Invaded Iran, did he? I must not have been paying attention to that one. Either that or your wishful thinking has gotten the best of you.

A few observations. First, I think it would be a mistake to think of Bin Laden as a fool or a coward. I believe he has a formal degree in Engineering, he travelled rather more widely than Bush, and he went to Afghanistan to risk his life with the Mujahedeen. If not brilliant, we have to acknowledge him as smart, capable and willing to take risks. It's always a mistake to underestimate the foe.

Indeed, 9/11 is what happens when a smart, capable risk taker goes up against a smirking, self-absorbed fool.

As for Bin Laden's plans, this is standard insurgency 101 stuff. Someone on this thread said it went back to the 80's and the Algerian Civil War. But I'd argue that it can be traced at least back to the 70's as a significant force, and the assassination of Anwar Sadat by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The thing to realize is that through the 50's and 60's there were two significant political movemements in the Arab world. Neither of them were democracy. The first was traditional rule - basically, government by monarchy or aristocracy, usually western supported traditional oligarchs.

The monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and the Persian Gulf are remnants or representatives of this wave. But originally, Iraq was a monarchy, as was Egypt and Libya.

The trouble with the Monarchies was that they tended to be corrupt, ineffective and often in western pockets. They were local faces on foreign rule. The most successful ones had lots of oil wealth to bribe their enemies.

The one exception to general corruption and ineffectiveness in these societies was in the military. The idea was that any Sheikh who stuck with 19th century military values was lunch. So the military in Arab societies tended to be centers of, for want of a better word, progressivism.

The military was where western ideas, technology, dress, modes of thought, tended to flourish, where secularism of various sorts took root. So, over and over again, Arab militaries tended to overthrow traditional governments, for the good of the country. The idea was to then throw off tradition, step out of the 19th century, and become modern 20th century and even western states. They liked democracy as a principal, they just didn't know how to fit it into the military command structure, so they tended to be autocracies. By the same token, the effort to use military organization to reform society and the economy made them seem like socialists, but they never really were. They were nation builders and nationalists, as well as reformers, and they promised a lot.

This is where the Baathists come from - the Assads in Syria, Nasser - Sadat- Mubarak in Egypt, Hussein in Iraq, Quaddaffi in Libya. We'll call the broad movement Baathism, its as good a name as any.

(There are anomalies - Syria was never a monarchy, being ruled by generals since independence. Lebanon was a democracy. Algeria started off as somewhat of a socialist democracy)

Okay, now, going into the seventies, Baathism wound up as discredited as Monarchism. The Baathists had not followed through on their promises of social reform and economic revitalisation, instead, they'd just wound up turning into another ruling oligarchy and people remained poor as ever. Worse, they wound up in a series of disastrous wars with Israel, and Chad, and Iran. The biggest Baathist state sold out completely by making peace with Israel.

So, by the 1970's and into the 1980's, the arabs only had two real forms of government or social organisation: Baathism and Monarchism, and both of these were popular failures with little real support. They endured with western support, directly or indirectly with oil wealth, and with a ruthless willingness to use force and violence... which they did at the drop of a hat.

Anyone with doubts as to how willing these regimes were to slaughter their own people should take a tour of the torture chambers of Syria or Egypt, or hang out with the Saudi religious police, or visit the mass graves of Hama, Syria or Basra, Iraq.

Both survived because they were very hard to overthrow, they'd made their peace with each other, and the middle east settled down to a long period of unpopular, but hard to get rid of, ruling regimes that were corrupt, ineffective, backwards but which suited western interests.

The only fly in the ointment for anyone was Israel. But even Israel served a purpose. As long as Arab despots could complain about Israel, they didn't have to worry about doing anything concrete at home. They had their own version of a 'far enemy' to blame things on. Not that they had any interest or ability to do anything about Israel... there was no investment there, apart from hot air, and a few dollars to malcontents.

This is the environment in which radical Islamic fundamentalism has emerged. From the failure of both previous kinds of Arab states. It was a movement that got its first big boost in the 80's, with the Iranian revolution. If those damned Shiites could do it, so could the Sunnis. And got its second big boost with the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The revolution was at hand!

And then in the 90's the whole thing seemed to stall out. The Algerian civil war went nowhere. Uprisings in Saudi Arabia failed. The Soviets went home and the Mujahedeen started fighting each other. The Taliban eventually won out in Afghanistan, but proved a disaster. The 90's was a lost decade of Islamic Fundamentalism.

Looked at with this perspective, Bin Laden's efforts seem to be aimed at kick starting the movement all over again, to regain the momentum and the movement that was building in the 80's. To get the revolution going again, by recreating the Jihad that united the movement in the 80's.... the holy war against an infidel occupying superpower.

As for the rest of it, provoking an enemy and destabilization are basically old hat guerilla tactics. This is essentially what the Red Brigades and Baader Meinhoff were trying to do in Germany and Italy in the 60's and 70's. I'd also note that unstable societies are where extremist movements rise fastest and highest... fundamentalists in the Algerian civil war, Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution, communists and fascists in the Spanish civil war, Nazi's in weimar germany, communists in China, etc.

 

[Ecofarm]

Ah, yes - The spread of democracy in the mideast - exactly what Bin Laden wants. Now I get it! Bin Laden = freedom fighter/liberator of the people. Cool.

Proposing that Bin Laden wants Islam to get a beat down and liberal democracies to replace Islamic States is rich. It puts Bin Laden in the Bush camp, as a warmonger. It makes clear that your enemies should be those who start wars. Bin Laden and Bush had the SAME plans... Get the US to invade Iraq. In fact, they were probably conspiring. Bin Laden = Bush.

So there you have it: the "bad" guys want war. But we don't! We're not Bush and we're not Bin Laden. We know that war is BAD. Even if the war liberates, right?

 

[silver 2039]

@Den Valdron brilliant.

Do you major in Middle Eastern studies or something?