RE: bin Laden's ambitions

["Austin, Andrew" <austina@xxxxxxxx>]

Marxism List,

I know that the New York Times is available on-line for those who have
registered with the service. But I have in the past on other lists sent
links to restricted services only to find that many list members could not
access them. I myself have been frustrated by links to restricted services.
I was trying to be helpful. I must not hesitate to point out that others
have posted to this list news stories - far more lengthy than the one I sent
- that are more easily available on-line that are NYT's articles, yet these
posters have not received such stern warnings.

On the political point Proyect wishes to make, it remains that the NYT
information is correct and that Risen and Engelberg's conclusions are solid.
(I am guessing Proyect finds fault with the conclusions.) Perhaps in some
people's eyes, the fact that the NYT is bourgeois means that their facts and
analyses are to be dismissed out of hand. It has certainly been the tactic
of some who do not like certain conclusions to (selectively) dismiss sources
on these grounds. People with this view are, of course, free to poke out
their eyes. But for those who wish to remain sighted, the NYT piece shows
that bin Laden is perpetrating a war on the West because he desires a global
Islamic order.

Hooking the WTC-Pentagon attacks up with U.S. foreign policy doesn't work as
an explanation. Issues like Palestine are exploited by bin Laden to create
the illusion of legitimacy for his cause. He hopes that people will hear his
speeches, peppered with references to Israel and Iraq, and say, "Well, you
know, he has a point." (So, then, does David Duke.) By tying his
anti-democratic vision to real world grievances, bin Laden seeks to throw
the robots into their predictable jerking motions. And robots that they are,
they respond just as predictably as their counterparts swimming in the
mainstream opinion stream. On the plane of the real world, the WTC-Pentagon
attacks can be tied to U.S. policy in Israel with no more validity that one
can tie the Oklahoma City bombing to U.S. policy in Israel. McVeigh, like
bin Laden, could point to the same history.

The fact is that bin Laden never needed U.S. assistance to either develop a
desire or to acquire the capacity to carry out the WTC-Pentagon attacks. He
doesn't need the history of U.S. foreign policy over the past 50 years to
motive his murderous ambitions. He is more driven by the defeat of Muslim
forces in Andalusia and the pushing back of Islamic forces in the eleventh
century than he is by the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In
bin Laden's world view, Christians and (especially) Jews and secularists are
enemies - "the infidels" - to be destroyed by or subjugated to "the
believers." So serious is bin Laden that the world should be brought under a
single Muslim ruler (could there be any doubt that bin Laden would be this
ruler?) that he has launched a "holy war" against "the west," in which the
WTC and Pentagon attacks are only the latest battles - and there would have
been more, had law enforcement officials failed to thwart al Qaeda advances
in Europe.

Andrew Austin
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