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CounterPunch
February
12, 2003
A Student's
View of the Bin Laden Tape
The Tape That Tells All
by NICK RING
It's not really surprising that the Bush administration
is making as much political hay as possible from the recently
recovered tape which purportedly features Osama bin Laden noting
"convergent interests" among Iraq's Ba'athists and
his own Islamists. What's surprising is how insecure that same
"security state" is willing to let the world become
in order to serve its own sometimes unfathomable interests. Drawing
the wrong conclusions is one thing intentionally misreading
evidence in a case of life or death is inexcusable.
The facts should be plain by now: Al-Qaeda
is an international terrorist organization that cannot be combated
in the Cold War, Rumsfeldian terms of nation-states. The U.S.
carried out widescale bombing and installed a "U.S.-friendly"
government in Afghanistan; Al-Qaeda's major leaders escaped arrest
and assassination (despite unsupported claims of capture or death
of one-third of those leaders), while their cadre continued to
successfully carry out attacks on civilians all over the world.
If it wasn't apparent before that warfare against a given state
would not majorly affect Al-Qaeda's ability to operate, incidents
following wholesale destruction of their "base of operations"
should have convinced any doubters. The current drive for war
with Iraq betrays the government's lack of will to confront the
terrorist threat on multilateral, internationalist terms. It
instead suggests some other motivation for constant war that
can be measured in false leaps and bounds as various states fall
to the U.S. machine. Whether that goal be international oil,
control over foreign and domestic security policy with no room
for dissent, or something as yet undiscovered by the American
people, it is obvious that it is not to stop Al-Qaeda.
More dangerous is the side-effect: the
U.S. has now entered into the business of helping to create "convergent
interests" between international terrorists and states like
Iraq. The newest tape provides no evidence for an Iraq-armed
Al-Qaeda; it does weigh greatly, however, towards the idea that
a U.S.-born conflict could yet make the strangest and deadliest
bedfellows. Figures in opposition must begin to question directly
the uselessness of unilateralism in doing anything but exacerbating
existing problems.
There is simply no unilateral way to
fight international terrorism. The U.S. could establish direct
military control over every "rogue state" in the world,
and the Al-Qaeda network would still function effectively enough
to carry out terrorist attacks against targets all over the world.
This is because Al-Qaeda is both too modern to be subject to
any state's control even if it has its support (along the lines
of multinational corporations), and too fringe to ever find a
"base of operations" in any one state, no matter how
Islamist (as the war on Afghanistan has shown). Certainly, attacking
secular dictatorships like Iraq, run by the "infidels"
deprecated by bin Laden on the same tape, will do little but
further the popularity and aims of Islamist revolutionaries in
those states' borders. It almost seems like pure disgust from
the White House for carrying forward a difficult, diplomatically
complex international war on terrorism when a war on the villain-of-the-week
will suffice.
Why is it so shocking, given the new
policy of pre-emptive strikes against possible threats to an
amorphous U.S. security, that bin Laden is now deciding to express
the same sympathy with the Iraqis that he always has claimed
with Palestine? We have given him his popular coup: a neverending
war between America and the Arab states that will fuel Al-Qaeda's
hit-and-run operations for years to come. Now, we are strengthening
his base by providing an ally in Iraq where there once was an
enemy making attacks on U.S. troops, instead of civilians,
very likely. The administration has responded with its own domestic
terror alerts, taking advantage of its policy of violence abroad
to stir paranoia in the homeland.
For the first time in months, the administration
is actually talking about bin Laden again, but only in terms
of the coming inevitable attack on Iraq. Yet, Bush's warmongering
dove, Powell, accuses France, Germany, and Belgium of destablizing
NATO by refusing to send military hardware to Turkey, another
country known for its brutal repression of its Kurdish minority
and misuse of foreign aid for its own designs. One might wonder
if by pursuing a useless war against international opinion, one
which we now know will promote the "convergence" of
current foes like Al-Qaeda and Iraq, we might rationally be seen
as more than a bit destructive ourselves?
Nick Ring
is a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
He can be reached at: jnring@bulldog.unca.edu
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February 8
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