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What bin Laden's Audio Tapes Reveal
By Tim Roemer,
The
Huffington Post
In the
past few days, Osama Bin Laden released two new
audiotapes, one pledging new violence against
Israel on the 60th anniversary of the Jewish
democracy's birth, the other castigating Arab
leaders for their failure to do similarly.
While some analysts dismiss these as a
fruitless bid for relevance, there are
important lessons--and warnings--to be drawn
from bin Laden's latest missives.
In Iraq, al-Qaeda has fallen back on the
defensive. The brutal tactics employed by the
group's Iraqi franchise have alienated it from
Iraq's Sunni population and even fellow
insurgents. Bin Laden's remarks should be
viewed as an attempt to change the subject away
from Iraq and towards anti-Israel
vitriol--territory with greater appeal in the
Islamic world as support for al-Qaeda's Iraqi
barbarism drops.
Some take comfort in the attempted rhetorical
pivot, seeing inevitable defeat. Already, many
prominent conservatives have all but declared
mission accomplished in the battle against
al-Qaeda. And amidst the back-and-forth of
campaign season, the al-Qaeda leader's latest
broadsides have been met, for the most part,
with a collective yawn from the American media.
Bin Laden and his cohorts, the conventional
wisdom goes, are "irrelevant."
Content with limited military successes in
Iraq, this administration has virtually ceded
the battle of words and ideas to al-Qaeda.
Words and ideas, though, can be just as
dangerous as guns and bombs.
For over a decade now, al-Qaeda has shamelessly
twisted the images and stories that come from
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to motivate
its adherents around the world towards
violence--this, despite having a negligible if
non-existent presence in Israel. Prior to their
current public relations downturn in Iraq,
al-Qaeda in Iraq similarly managed to harness
the anger of so many outside the country,
despite being a discrete minority among
insurgents there.
Al-Qaeda has proven itself a master of
messaging, mobility and regeneration. As much
as we may see this latest message as a
transparently cynical ploy, we need to
recognize that too many others will not. Until
our government deems al-Qaeda's ideological
basis worthy of attacking, the terrorist group
will always have space to regenerate, whether
in the remote regions of Pakistan or the hearts
and minds of angry young men around the world.
