OCCOM BILL wrote:Sozobe... do you honestly believe Usama would rather prolong the fight than win it?
Of course he wants to win it. But how is he going to win it? And who is he looking to defeat?
Put in simplistic terms, these are his main goals:
- Get the current Arab governments overthrown
- Create Islamist states instead
- Get all American troops and influence out
Now how is he going to achieve this? He cant ever directly beat America. His first target, his real target, are the Arab governments.
Those his people can overthrow. How? If things get bad enough - verelendungstheory and all that. If he can rally the Arabs around him and make them think he's their salvation, their only salvation left. What does he need to achieve that? An enemy. A proper, titanic arch enemy. The black to his white, or vice versa.
OBL genuinely wants the Americans out. But he doesnt just want the current governments to send them away -
he wants to be in power. Bush is doing him a great service, by helping him frame the question as an us-or-them, us vs. them situation. Rally behind the only true Muslim leader who dares to stand up against the cruel American invader! Works like a dream.
With someone less messianistic, less interventionist, less us vs them than Bush in power, there'd be that much less of an enemy image. No overriding need to rally all Muslim troops behind his resistance, no overriding motivation to overthrow those cowardly Arab regimes who depend on the yankee dollar.
Think of the communists of old - and their Verelendungs theory I just mentioned. They believed that the only way the people would ever rise up in revolution was if things got bad enough first. Ergo, the worse things became, the better it was. The German communists of the late 20s, early 30s speeched against the Nazis, but in practice focused most of their attention on fighting the social-democrats, those moderate rivals who might succeed in luring the proletariat away from true revolution. The "social-fascists", they called them, trying to make them sound worse than the real fascists. The fascists themselves - those for long they considered mostly a useful tool. With such an enemy opposite them, the center would automatically be crushed in the middle - leaving only them, the communists, and those nazis for the final, decisive battle.
Same logic here. There is no greater boon imaginable for OBL's regional ambitions than a world in which the "Arab street" sees only an American warmonger on the one hand, and Osamas Islamist resistance on the other. Only that scenario, the ultimate recruitment ground as Sozobe said, can help him sweep aside all those pesky governments and regimes now in place, all those possible moderate alternatives in the Muslim world. Us or them! Its the best enemy he can think of. And once he
is the one to rule over Arabia, he wont find it so hard to keep American troops out. Along with the rest of his shopping list.
Thats the idea. You may disagree, but stupidity its not. The logic has ample historical precedence.
