The 10/29/04 Osama bin Laden tape

Our view of the war on terror has become so completely politicized - and so highly partisan - that when Al-Jazeera broadcast a new tape from Osama bin Laden on Friday, the mainstream media and the Big Pundits fixated immediately on the possible effect on the US presidential election.

My own view is that it's likely to have little if any effect on Tuesday's election.  Although in a very close race, a little shift can mean a lot.  See Florida 2000.

Thinking about it, I realize that my view of that is heavily influenced by my understanding of the effect of the 11-M (March 11) attack in Madrid on the Spanish national elections.  The Republicans here quickly made their assumption that the 11-M attack threw the election to the anti-Iraq War Socialists, and that influencing the election was the main purpose of the timing of the attack.

While it's impossible to say with precision, I'm not sure either assumption is correct.  The likelihood that the attack itself made people vote for the opposition Socialists is highly doubtful.  The polls prior to the attack were showing a trend toward the Socialists, and the final outcome was consistent with that trend.  (The attack was on a Thursday, and the election was the following Sunday.)

There is good evidence that a number of voters were upset by the ruling conservative party's quick attempt to shift blame for the attack onto the Spanish separatist ETA terrorist group.  This was perceived by many as a trick to deflect any possible criticism of the government for having made Spain more vulnerable to terrorists by participating in the Iraq War, and they were outraged that the government wasn't being straight with them about what they knew about the attack.  But there was no real evidence from the polls that any such backlash effect swayed the vote to any significant degree, either.

The Iraq War was tremendously unpopular with the Spanish public, and that discontent was decisive in the election.  The 11-M attack did not change that.

So I'm inclined to think that the new Bin Laden tape is unlikely to sway many voters in America between now and Tuesday.  Of course, if one of the campaigns makes some big goof with it, or if the media coverage goes wild, that could make me wrong.  But I haven't heard anything about the tape that makes me think it adds anything to our knowledge of Bin Laden's intentions or the candidate's proposed anti-terrorism approaches that should change anyone's mind.

Another thing about Spain's experience that has been striking to me is that Spanish authorities continue to uncover evidence about new jihadist strikes against Spanish targets.  That's not surprising.  American conservatives assume that the jihadists targeted Spain because of the Iraq War.  But that was only one factor.  In the jihadist worldview, promoted by Bin Laden and shared by his admirers, Muslims have a mission from God to regain control of all the areas once ruled by Muslims.  And what is now Spain was mostly Muslim-ruled.  Regardless of the Iraq War, the jihadist see Spain as a long-term enemy.

And that makes me wonder whether Bin Laden's latest tape had anything to do with an intention to influence the election one way or the other.  It wouldn't surprise me that the timing of the release had something to do with the election, because it would be likely to get more attention, worldwide and in the US so close to the election.

But I just don't know enough about how Bin Laden and other jihadists view democratic elections in countries that are not predominantly Muslim to speculate very much about how he may see the US elections.  He may well think elections in a country not ruled by sharia (Islamic law) are meaningless, or worse.

And while he is a shrewd politician in his particular niche, he also sees the world in religious terms.  And it's a view in which dreams and visions and signs and portents play a large role.  He may not be as clinically disengaged from reality as your average cult leader.  But he's looking at the world in terms of what he understands to be God's plan, and expects that in the grand course of history, a united Muslim Caliphate will be established one day that will unite all current and former Muslims land under godly rule.

The fact that Osama hears very different messages from God than George W. Bush doesn't mean he doesn't take them very seriously.  So while our TV talking heads and our Potemkin press corps merrily process Osama's message through the limited set of American political clichees to which they restrict themselves, Bin Laden surely to see the significance of the US presidential election in radically different terms than most Americans.

Bin Laden sees the struggle for Afghanistan as particularly important, given its supposed role in the fall of the Soviet Union and in the creation of the present-day jihadist movement.  Bin Laden could well be thinking that Kerry could pull out of Iraq and concentrate more heavily on Afghanistan.  Would that be preferable from Bin Laden's point of view?  I don't know.

Maybe he would see that as an opportunity to escalate the fight against the "Jewish and Christian crusaders" on more favorable turf in Afghanistan and bring about their inevitable fall faster.  He would surely claim an American pullout from Iraq as a victory.  Presumably, this would lead him to prefer Kerry.

Conversely, he may well see that as a more threatening scenario, depriving the jihadists of the dramatic evidence they receive every day in Iraq that the "crusaders" are out to destroy Islam.  And a shift by the US to a greater focus on fighting the jihadists in Afghanistan could well appear to him as a potentially catastrophic development.  This view would seem to make him more inclined toward Bush.

It may well be that he's not thinking in terms of preferring one candidate to the other at all.  And that he doesn't care which party heads the US government, as long as the jihadists defeat it in the Muslim world.  Or he may think, like many Christian fundamentalists in America profess to believe, that the choice of the president is divinely ordained, and therefore that it's pointless for him to prefer one party to the other.

If our government had focused for the last three years on combatting Bin Laden and other anti-American jihadists, maybe our lazy media would at least have a broader set of superficial scripts from which to work while attempting to process something like the latest Bin Laden tape.  Instead, we've had to learn about the sacred sites of Najaf and the slum dwellers of Baghdad and the clan structures in Fallujah.

So when a new Bin Laden tape comes in, about all the talking heads can give us is mindless chatter about how it may help this or that candidate.  Big Pundit conventional wisdom at the moment, so far as I can tell from my limited perspective, seems to assume that a focus on terrorism helps Bush, although it's part of the mystical knowledge granted only to Big Pundits to see how that is so obviously the case.