Osama bin Laden in his Own Words

(This was a posting number 99 on a long political discussion thread at BeliefNet.)

This thread has followed the trajectory of many that are spun here. A local ideologue -- one with more persistence than sense -- brings up an inflammatory subject with the aim of inciting liberals and baiting them into outraged responses. And he was successful in achieving that goal.

However, what no one has noticed so far is that he seems to have no interest in the actual tape recording itself and the light that it might shed on this discussion, but only in his "interpretation" of it, as the first post clearly states. This is the equivalent of writing a research paper on the Declaration of Independence without reading or referring to the primary document.

So for anyone remotely interested in actually reading Mr. bin Laden's transmission rather than a blackshirt interpretation of a radical Islamist manifesto, it's here.

First of all, in reading the transcript I was convinced once more that we have no reason to doubt that Mr. bin Laden is still alive. He might be dead, because he's had serious health problems for a long time, but we have no evidence of his demise, and this message, while shorter than previous ones, is written and was delivered in the same calm, quiet, and very confident tone as the others.

Secondly, I was struck by how very much alike bin Laden and Bush are, almost like the Blues Brothers. Both have God on their sides, and both are directly guided in their violent quests for glory and domination of the Middle East directly by God's hand. Bin Laden says so more than once in this message ("By the grace of Allah"), and Bush has been quoted in major media such as the New Yorker and Washington Post as saying that God was responsible for his having been elected, and is the guiding force behind his quest to bring what he calls democracy (and he probably actually believes that part of it) to the places in the world that don't have it yet.

They both have contempt for logic and rational thinking, compromise, the politics of consensus, and science. There is no middle way when God's on your side.

Bin Laden, like Bush, is given to making grandiose claims sometimes, as when he says "the Mujahideen have with the grace of Allah succeeded in breaking through all the security measures undertaken by the transgressing nations time after time." I wondered how he'd answer if asked why the mujahadeen haven't broken through into the Green Zone yet.

But it's very clear from this short address that the war, or wars in the Middle East are going exactly the way bin Laden wanted them to. For him, it's all good.

I don't know which of these guys, Bush or bin Laden, is more of a threat to the world and the people in it. They're both very scary. Bin Laden is scarier in some ways because he's obviously much more intelligent and much better spoken than Bush -- a better tactician, and a much more self-controlled, limited-resources type fighter. He'll bide his time and wait for his opening.

The American dictator, on the other hand, may be an ignoramus and an insecure adolescent, but he's got the world's most overpoweringly lethal killing machine at his beck and call. Besides, he's very unpredictable, because he's so emotionally unstable. All that makes him the more dangerous of the two, in the final analysis.

As for bin Laden's final threat -- that if you liked 9/11, just wait till you see the sequel -- who knows? Whether they're able to pull off another big attack, or fail in being able to mount or execute one, whatever happens is the will of Allah.