One of the best-informed interpreters of Bin Laden's jihadist thought in English is the CIA counterterrorism analyst Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (2004), the author designated as Anonymous on the book. (See The Secret History of Anonymous by Jason Vest, Boston Phoenix 07/02-08/04 for more information on Scheuer.)
Previous Bin Laden messages to the American people
Scheuer argues that Bin Laden's appeals to the people of the United States are mainly aimed at justifying terrorist attacks against Americans, and at justifying attacks on unarmed civilians by implicating ordinary citizens in what the jihadists - and some significant portion of the Muslim world - understand to be crimes by the United States. Bin Laden has argued before in his statements that because the US is a democracy, the people of the US have the power to end these crimes against Muslims.
It's worth noting what a range of actions Bin Laden considers crimes against Muslims. Scheuer in Imperial Hubris quotes Bin Laden from 2001-2 as follows (he refers to "documents" apparently in the context of responsding to criticism of the wills written by the 9/11 hijackers):
For God's sake, what are the documents that incrimate the Palestinian people that warrant the massacres against them, which have been going on for more than five decades at the hands of the Crusaders and the Jews. What is the evidence against the people of Iraq to warrant their blockade and being killed in a way that is unprecedented in history. What documents incriminated the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzogovina and warranted the Western Crusaders, with the United States at their head, to unleash their Serb ally to annihilate and displace the Muslim people in the region under UN cover. What is the crime of the Kasmiri people and what documents do the worshippers of cows [Hindus] possess to make them sanction their blood for more than fifty years. What have Muslims in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and the Central Asian republics committed to warrent being invaded by the brutal Soviet military regime and after it communism's killing, annihilating, and displacing tens of millions of them. What evidence did the United States have the day it destroyed Afghanistan and killed and displaced the Muslims there. It evenlaunched prior to that the unfair blockade of [the Afghans] under UN cover. Under the same cover Indonesia was ripped apart; Muslims were forced to leave Timor. ... Under the UN cover, too, it intervened in Somalia, killing and desecrating the land of Islam there. It is even the first to urge the Crusade rulers in the Philippines to annihilate our Muslim brothers there. There are many other countless issues. We say that all the Muslims that the international Crusader-Zionist machine is annihilating have not committed any crime other than to say God is our [God].
It should be obvious from this list of offenses by the "Western Crusaders" that simply leaving the war in Iraq will not end the ongoing sins of the United States in Bin Laden's eyes and those of his followers and sympathizers. There is no foreseeable combination of policies under either a Bush or Kerry administration in 2005-9 that would do so.
Bin Laden's argument - again, directed only in form at Americans, but really aimed at justifying attacks against American civilians in the eyes of Muslims - is that because the American people elect the government that participates in these various kinds of "Crusader-Zionist" war against Islam, they have no right to complain that the jihadists are killing civilians. Scheuer quotes Bin Laden from 2002:
Well this argument contradicts your claim that America is the land of freedom and democracy, in which every American irrespective of gender, color, age, or intellectual ability has a vote. It is a fundamental principle of any democracy that the people choose their leaders, and as such, approve and are party to the actions of their leaders. So "in the land of freedom" each Americans is"free" to select their [sic] leader because they have the right to do so and as such they give consent to the policies their elected Government adopts. This includes the support of Israel manifesting itself in mmany ways including billions of dollars in military aid. By electing these leaders, the American people have given their consent to the incarceration of the Palestinian people, the demolition of Palestinian homes and the slaughter of the childrenof Iraq. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government, yet time and again, polls show the American people support the policies of the elected Government. ... This is why the American people are not innocent. The American people are active members in all these crimes.
The new tape
This gives some context to the tape played on Al-Jazeera on Friday: Bin Laden Speaks to American People (Reuters) Washington Post 10/30/04.
O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan [i.e., 9/11-type attacks], about war and its causes and results.
Security is an important foundation of human life, and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example.
It is known that those who hate freedom do not possess proud souls like those of the 19, may God rest their souls. We fight you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security, we squander yours.
These statements are in line with those from 2002 quoted above. When he says here "you squander our security," he's not just talking about Bush and Rumsfeld, or about Republicans only. He's addressing "O American people," at least formally. It's really a continuation of his earlier justification for blaming ordinary Americans for the crimes against Islam and thereby jusfying the targeting of civilian noncombantants in America for terrorist attacks.
A reminder of Lebanon
I am surprised by you. Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you, and therefore the reasons are still there for a repeat of what happened.
God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers. But after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly werethat of 1982 and the events that followed -- when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. 6th Fleet.
In those difficult moments, many emotions came over me that are hard to describe, but that produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.
As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and stop killing our children and women.
This is another indication that this message is really intended for an Arab and Muslim audience, not for Americans. Most Americans can barely remember the incidents to which he's referring, if they can remember them at all. A large number of the American soldiers in Iraq weren't even born in 1982. It's also most likely a reminder to his real Muslim audience of the suicide attack against an American Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983 that killed 241 American soldiers and prompted the Reagan administration to withdraw US troops that were stationed in Lebanon. That was part of a joint mission with France, who lost 58 soldiers killed in a separate attack on the same day. The jihadists consider this a succesful example of a humiliating defeat of the Americans, or the "Crusader-Zionist" forces.
Since both the jihadists and some of our own "neoconservative" zealots think the withdrawal from Lebanon represented a failure of American will that encouraged The Terrorists by showing weakness, it's worth remembering some details of how the decision to withdraw came about. Lou Cannon described the process in his excellent President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991), written long before current disputes over the Iraq War. Reagan's initial reaction, and that of his Secretary of State George Schultz, was to keep the troops in Lebanon. Reagan made a classic statement using the sacrifice of the dead to sanctify the cause that October, saying, "We must not strip every ounce of meaning and purpose from their courageous sacrifice."
But Reagan was persuaded to withdraw the troops 3 1/2 months after the successful terrorist attack. Cannon describes thepressures at work:
Republican politicians on Capitol Hill and within the White House took a different view [than Reagan and Schultz]. With few exceptions, they had lined up loyally behind the president on Lebanon [i.e., supported military intervention], even though Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker [R-Tenn] had always been skeptical about the merits of intervention. Now, Republican congressmen and White House Chief of Staff James Baker [the Bush family "fixer"] looked at Lebanon and saw Vietnam. The two Bakers knew that [the invasion of ] Grenada [just after the Beirut attack] and the president's October 27 speech had bought them time, and they wanted to use it to construct a rationale for withdrawal. The Bakers believed that Lebanon had the potential to become a major Republican political liability in 1984. Though neither of them had rapper with [Defense Secretary Casper] Weinberger, they became de facto allies of the Pentagon in the attempt to manuever Reagan into withdrawing the Marines. In hindsight, this withdrawal seems inevitable. But in the aftermath of the bombing in Beirut, the Bakers were uncertain if Reagan could be persuaded to redeploy [i.e., withdraw] the Marines. As distanced as he was from day-to-day decision-making, Reagan could be stubbornly resistent to changing his position once he had taken a stand. He believed what he had told the nation on television. He did not want to abandon what he called the "successful" U.S. mission in Lebanon.
Four events forced Reagan to face political reality. The first was the failure of a retaiatory mission that was pushed by the State Department and opposed by the Pentagon. The second was the report of the Department of Defense Commission on Beirut, chaired by retired Admiral Robert Long. The third was the reaction of Congress, agitated by changing public opinion during its Christmas recess. And the fourth was the collapse of the Lebanese Army, on which the administration had lavished much equipment, training and false hopes.
I don't actually recall hearing much criticism of the decision to withdraw from Lebanon in 1984 until after the 9/11 attacks. The intervention was questionable in the first place. And the fact that a number of US Marines had died there may have given a special moral sanction to the effort. But it didn't increase the practical chances of its success. Reagan went on to a landslide reelection that year, and his alleged toughness in foreign policy is invoked by Republicans today at every opportunity.
The fact that some enemies of the US may have interpreted it at the time - or now - as a defeat for the US does not mean the decision to withdraw was incorrect. On the other hand, the decision to withdraw soon afterward and the inevitable bureacratic and political damage-control efforts may have led policy-makers and military planners to overlook some important lessons to be learned from what was undoubtedly the failure of that particular mission.
Bush=Unjust Muslim rulers=the American people
Also in Bin Laden's statement Friday:
We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings. . . . They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery.
He [Bush] adopted despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab rulers and called it the Patriot Act under the guise of combating terrorism. . . .
The actual audience here seems again to be the Arab Muslim world. In the terms of the Islamists, Bin Laden is saying that the "near enemy" (home country regimes) are as evil as the widely hated "far enemy," the United States, and the Bush administration in particular.
We had agreed with the [the Sept. 11] overall commander Mohamed Atta, may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes -- before Bush and his administration could take notice.
It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This gave us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God. . . .
This is obviously mocking Bush. But I get the feeling I'm missing something here in this reading. Bin Laden seems to be claiming direct, detailed involvement in the minutuae of planning the 9/11 attacks, which is certainly a questionable claim. And what does it meanthat Bush left the people in the tower "to face those horrors alone"? Is he criticizing Bush for not flying personally to the Twin Towers immediately? I have the feeling I'm missing something here.
Your security is not in the hands of [Democratic presidential candidate John F.] Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands, and each state that does not harm our security will remain safe.
This is essentially saying that both Kerry and Bush will continue to pursue anti-Muslim policies. And that therefore Al Qaeda will consider American civilians targets for attack. Seen in this context, it has little if anything to do with the election at all.
Same song, different verse
After looking at this message more closely, it seems to me that the content is really a restatement for Muslims of why Bin Laden and his jihadists considered it religiously justified to deliberated attack American civilian noncombatants. The timing just before the election is a way to emphasize his point that the fact of elections makes the American people, as a whole and individually, guilty of crimes against Islam.
Scheuer summarzed Bin Laden's earlier messages formally addressed to the American people as follows, and nothing in the current message seems to change the basic theme:
To paraphrase the foregoing [from Bin Laden]: I will be mostly quiet. I will attack those who help you. I will wage war on you in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. I will incite all Muslims against you. I will strike you again in the United States, if possible with a weapon of mass destruction. I will try to destroy your economy. Though you are evil, I care nothing for you, your beliefs, or your ways, but I will force you to end several of your policies toward Muslims. I will not grow weary, weak, or irresolute. I will not compromise. You will, God willing, be defeated.
Writing about evenearlier versions of Bin Laden's messages to America, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon write in The Age of Sacred Terror (2002):
He continued to rail against the prsence of U.S. troops on the Arabian peninsula, and, although he called them "the shadow of the American presence," he spoke less about Saudi Arabia's rulers. In March 1997 he gave CNN's Peter Arnett the first television interview with a Western broadcaster, in which he declared: "The concentration at this point of jihad is against the American occupiers." In an interview two months later with John Miller of ABC News, he complained that "the truth is that the whole Muslim world is the victim of international terrorism, engineeered by America at the United Nations. We are a nation whose sacred symbols have been looted and whose wealth and resources have been plundered." Without taking responsibility for the OPM-SANG and Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia, he described them as a natural reaction to American depredations. But he pointedly remarked that because of the horrors being inflicted on the umma [Muslim community] everywhere, removal of the American troops [from Saudi Arabia] would not stop his campaign: "The driving-away jihad against the US does not stop with its withdrawal from the Arabian peninsula, but rather it must desist from aggressive intervention against Muslims in the whole world." For halting the fight, at least againt "the Western regimes and the government of the United States of America," bin Laden offered a piece of advice: "If their people do not wish to be harmed inside their very own countries, they should seek to elect governments that are truly representative of them and that can protect their interests."
The tape this week is new, but the basic message is not. The latest message echoes the "advice" to American and other Western voters from that ABC interview in 1997.
Bin Laden is still planning and inciting jihad against the United States, and will continue to do so after the 2004 election, regardless of the outcome. Sadly, this is unlikely stop our Potemkin press corps from interpreting the tape as yet another incident in the American presidential campaign, and obsessing about the nuances of this or that political operative's response to it.
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