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Steyn: Osama doesnt matter any more
So they decide to take the precaution of bogging them down in Afghanistan. In post-Watergate Washington, you cant put down Covert Operation to destabilise the Hindu Kush as a line item on the Federal budget. So the administration has a quiet word with their chums in the region, and the House of Saud, whose expenditures are subject to less rigorous audits than the CIAs, agrees to pony up the cash and run the recruitment ads, and Pakistans ISI comes on board as the local liaison. The Democrats rage all the time about the outsourcing of American jobs to the Third World, but the outsourcing of a critical anti-Soviet operation reverberated all the way to 9/11. It dramatically enhanced both the reach and prestige of Saudi Wahabism and the ISI, and it deluded the jihadi into believing theyd overthrown the Soviet Union because the Great Satan was a big sissy who was too scared to do it himself.Now whats left of al-Qaedas leadership sits around a semi-ruined village crossing names out of its Rolodex the A-list Saudi princes who no longer return calls and hoping that the next time one of its freelance operations kills a bunch of people, they wont be yet another bunch of Muslims, as they have been remorselessly in Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh, etc. Yet every time they switch on the TV, there are the experts bleating about the Iraqi quagmire and Democrats asserting that an historically low rate of casualties is too high a price to pay and we need to skedaddle out of there. You cant blame Osama or whoever makes his audio tapes for being confused. Ive written before about the media bubble the tendency of Democrats and the press to reinforce each others illusions. But Im saddened to think you can be halfway round the globe in some of the wildest turf on earth where no states writ runs and still be trapped in the media bubble. Osama may be the most pitiful example of a man who made the mistake of confusing media conventional wisdom with reality. In the old days he was a smarter than average nutter. He created a terror organisation whose diffused structure made it hard for its enemies to tell whether they were winning against it. But, by the same token, that structure also makes it hard for him to tell whether hes winning against us. And right now, as that whiney loser cassette tape suggests, theyre the ones who could use a victory. Osama bin Laden is, in that sense, just another symptom rather than the cause of our recent troubles. The spread of Wahabism, which Prince Turki and others persuaded the CIA to use as a strategic asset of convenience, is a bigger problem. And the Saudi-funded radicalisation of Muslim populations around the world is a bigger one still, and may yet prove terminal for parts of Europe. But a man in Waziristan or Overtheristan watching Cindy Sheehan on CNN? Hes not what its about any more. Posted by: tipper 2006-01-26 |
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