Special Analysis: Osama's Message

Osama bin Laden's recent audiotape, combined with the recent message from Adam Gadahn/Azzam al-Ameriki, have left more than a few Americans and intelligence and law enforcement analysts puzzled as to what his apparent purpose is and why he would break cover this late in the game. This analysis will attempt to puzzle out the meaning of bin Laden's statement on a point-by-point analysis and what I think his objectives are in making it. I'm going to be using the MEMRI, BBC, and al-Jazeera transcripts of the excerpts that were broadcast on al-Jazeera on Friday, shifting between the three as differences arise.

I should note that because we're dealing with a non-Roman language (Arabic), there are going to be differences in how to properly translate some portions of the tape. If you're familiar with all of the differences inherent in various translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew or Aramaic into English, we're kind of dealing with the same thing here. Al-Jazeera is using the English subtitles provided by the al-Sahab propaganda company that produced the video in their translation.

The message ...

To begin: Peace be upon he who follow the Guidance.

This greeting is pretty much pro forma for bin Laden, though the Islamic nature of it tends to be fairly low-key, as is the general Islamic character of the tape, a fact that Amir Taheri and others have noted. To me, this absence of Islamic rhetoric represents a shift in bin Laden's rhetorical strategy that we first saw in his April 2004 videotape in which he cited among other things Halliburton as the main cause of the war in Iraq and announced the possibility of a truce between al-Qaeda and any European government willing to take him up on his offer.

The less religious and more political his rhetoric becomes, the more concerned I would be because it serves to widen his appeal outside his traditional audience in the Islamic world to possibly include tacit or active alliances with non-Islamic powers. And when I say that, I'm not so much talking about far right or far left factions here in the West as I am communist states like North Korea.

Oh the American people, I address these words to you regarding the optimal manner of avoiding another Manhattan, and regarding the war, its causes, and its consequences. But before this, I say to you: Security is one of the important pillars of human life, and free men do not take their security lightly, contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom.

"Another Manhattan," of course, refers to 9/11. "The war" he refers to, I assume refers to the war in Iraq, and it should be noted that bin Laden appears to view it as being one and the same as the general US-led offensive against himself and his organization, i.e. the war on terrorism. The point he is attempting to make here is that as long as the US pursues what he considers "anti-Islamic policies," he is going to keep attacking them. As noted in Imperial Hubris among a multitude of other sources, bin Laden basically views "anti-Islamic" as being anything that runs against the goals of himself or his organization, though I tend to take a different view on the solution to the problem than does the author of Hubris. Essentially, as long as the US continues to obstruct al-Qaeda's goals with respect to the Middle East (something I would argue we do there simply by virtue of our existence), they're going to keep attacking us.

The charge that al-Qaeda does not hate freedom is an interesting one, as even Juan Cole of all people has noted that bin Laden has more or less embraced Neo-Wilsonian rhetoric with respect to the organization's goals for the Middle East more commonly used by American neoconservatives is interesting.

My guess would be that he is attempting to tap into the pro-democracy impulses that have rocked many quarters of the Arab world over the course of the last year as part of a bid to position himself as their champion before the US has the opportunity to do so, probably figuring that he can radicalize these impulses toward his own ends and stage a "one man, one vote, one time" situation when the time is ripe. The fact that he recognizes just how potent a weapon pro-democratic sentiments in the Middle East would be in his arsenal if he can emerge as its public champion should also serve as a notice to all of the Middle East experts out there who believe that working to democratize the region is a fool's errand.

Let him explain why we did not attack Sweden, for example.

Probably because Sweden does not pose an existential threat to al-Qaeda's agenda for the Middle East. From the view of bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, Europe is more or less beneath their contempt with the possible exception of France (because of its sponsorship of the Algerian government) and they expect the Continent more or less Islamicized by the end of the century in any event.

The events of 3/11 in Spain also appear to have caused bin Laden to believe that he can knock European governments out of the fight with relative ease, hence his offer of a truce (suhl, which is granted to a defeated enemy) to them back in April. I'm not saying that these characterizations are necessarily accurate, but rather that this is what the al-Qaeda leadership believes.

Clearly, those who hate freedom have no pride, unlike the 19 [suicide hijackers of 9/11], may Allah have mercy on them. We have been fighting you because we are free men who do not remain silent in the face of injustice. We want to restore our [Islamic] nation's freedom. Just as you violate our security, we violate yours.

Here again is his attempt to "hijack" the pro-democratization movement with respect to the Middle East and rhetorically juxtaposes membership in al-Qaeda with subjugation under the corrupt and despotic governments of the Middle East.

This is truly something that I would be paying attention to if I were a government analyst, because if nothing else it marks bin Laden as an extremely shrewd and manipulative observer of Middle East politics. No longer is he claiming to battle for the restoration of the Caliphate (though one of his lieutenants, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan leader Tahir Yuldashev recently released a video of his own to tell the base that this is still very much on the organization's agenda) with himself or a puppet like Mullah Omar at its head. Instead, now he is arguing that he wants to overthrow the governments of the Middle East in order to establish a "free ummah," in many ways echoing statements by President Bush and others about the need to spread democracy in the Arab world.

This concerns me for a number of reasons. The Cold War and post-Cold War world is full of examples in which entirely legitimate pro-democracy or self-determination campaigns often became every bit as bad or worse than the regime they were fighting. A lot of people in the US foreign policy establishment are more or less wanting to pull the plug on calls for greater efforts to democratization in the Islamic world, instead favoring stability in the region. Without getting into the merits or lack thereof of this approach, if the US pulls the plug on the pro-democratization initiative in the Middle East, bin Laden seems to be more or less positioning himself to fill the void. In other words, in the absence of respectable actors, the not-so-respectable ones are going to take over.

Just something to think long and hard over.

But I am amazed at you. Although we have entered the fourth year after the events of 9/11, Bush is still practicing distortion and deception against you and he is still concealing the true cause from you. Consequently, the motives for its reoccurrence still exist.

The BBC renders that last sentence "Thus, the motives still exist for repeating what happened."

The other way that phrase being translated as "practicing distortion and deception can also be rendered is as "misleading" - it's all about whether you're going for literal or dynamic equivalence in the translation. I haven't seen clips of Democratic or American liberal criticisms of Bush in Arabic (and if anybody knows where to find some, do let me know), so I'm unsure as to whether or not bin Laden is trying to make a deliberate reference to the claim that's been floating around in Democratic circles that Bush "misleads" America, which I think has been a standard claim for about a year or two now.

In any event, bin Laden is claiming that Bush is being dishonest with the American public about the true causes of 9/11 by not informing us that we were attacked because we won't bin Laden rule the Middle East (though I doubt he'd phrase it quite like that) and instead citing al-Qaeda's hatred of freedom. I myself don't see much of a difference between the two, but a different form of this criticism (that we were attacked because of US Middle East policies rather than due to al-Qaeda's hatred of freedom) has also been circulating in a number of circles for quite some time now.

So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and I shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken for you to consider.

I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers.

The basic gist of this is that he's going to tell his audience what Bush has been hiding from the American public. Because we're dealing with as close to a literal translation as you can get with Arabic here that last part reads kind of funny - he's saying that he didn't start out his jihadi career planning to destroy the World Trade Center.

But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

This is actually quite savvy for him to say this, as in one fell stroke he capitalizes on the Palestinian lightning rod issue and answers criticisms of him that have appeared in Arab circles that he only turned against the US after the Afghan War against the Soviet Union was concluded and he had no further need for them - a variant of the "bin Laden was a CIA agent" meme. Under close examination however, doesn't make a great deal of sense, given that he waited until 2001 (after the Israeli withdrawl from southern Lebanon) to launch his attack on the US and has never once acted against the Israeli forces stationed there. The closest thing I'm even aware of with respect to al-Qaeda activity in Lebanon during the Israeli presence there is the Dinnieh group, and they were mainly interested in fighting the Lebanese government, not the Israelis.

I should note, however, that by invoking himself as a fan of resistance against the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, bin Laden is tacitly complementing Hezbollah.

Oh yes, and the forces stationed in Lebanon in the 1980s included American, French, and Italian troops among others, all of whom I believe were there under a UN mandate.

The events that affected my soul in a difficult way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that.

Apparently not enough to leave Afghanistan (or rather, Pakistan, as bin Laden was based in Peshawar at this point with his mentor Abdullah Azzam). I'll ignore the inconsistency that he attacked the US in 2001, nearly 10 years after the US and nearly 1 year after Israel had pulled out of Lebanon. If this is supposed to be Reason #865,332 why he hates the West, okay, but I don't see why we should take that as any more credible a reason than those he has enumerated at length on previously ...

And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.

In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

If this is intended to convince his critics in the Arab world regarding allegations of him being willing to work with the Great Satan when it served his needs, I think it's likely to fall fairly short. One might note that he appears to drop any pretense of trying to argue that those killed on 9/11 weren't innocent civilians and stops just short of explicitly stating that it's acceptable to kill an enemy's women and children if they do the same to you. As this kind of equivocation is generally frowned upon by most Islamic authorities, I can understand why he avoided coming out and saying as much, but it seems like he's trying more and more these days to appeal to Arab pride and anger rather than Islamic law, the implications of which you can judge for yourself.

We had no difficulty dealing with Bush and his administration, because it resembles the regimes in our [Arab] countries, half of which are ruled by the military, and the other half are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents with whom we have had a lot of experience. Among both types, there are many who are known for their conceit, arrogance, greed, and for taking money dishonestly.

Here's another sign that bin Laden is twisting Wilsonian rhetoric to his needs, this time in order to castigate against the corrupt and despotic regimes that dominate the Arab world. His basic argument is that there is no fundamental difference between the dictatorships of the Arab world and the Bush administration, a rhetorical argument that one encounters from time to time among some of its less cordial detractors. With the exception of the nepotism charge, there doesn't appear to be any deliberate mirroring of US political rhetoric.

This resemblance began with the visit of Bush Sr. to the region. While some of our people were dazzled by the U.S. and hoped that these visits would influence our countries, it was he who was influenced by these monarchic and military regimes. He envied them for remaining in their positions for decades, while embezzling the nation's public funds with no supervision whatsoever. He bequeathed tyranny and the suppression of liberties to his son and they called it the Patriot Act, under the pretext of the war on terrorism.

Bush Sr. liked the idea of appointing [his] sons as state governors. Similarly, he did not neglect to import into Florida the expertise in falsifying [elections] from the leaders of this region in order to benefit from it in difficult moments.

Given this and other the next set of rhetoric, I myself find it all but inconceiveable to argue that bin Laden hasn't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 and adopted its arguments to suit his own purposes. Does anybody know if has Fahrenheit 9/11 been screened in Pakistan yet? In any event, no doubt Michael Moore will be pleased to know that the man whose only complaint he once had with him was that he attacked "blue" rather than "red" states seems to like his movie ...

Bin Laden's adoption of a familiar litany of anti-Bush charges as his own should be viewed through the prism of a very shrewd and extremely cynical observer of American politics rather than his agreement or lack thereof with them.

In all seriousness, I very much doubt he cares all that much about the state of American civil liberties after 9/11 or voting procedures in Florida, but he's repeating them because he knows enough about the US to know that these are lightning rod issues that divide many of us as Americans. It's the same reason why, in past statements, he has mentioned social conservative criticisms of American morality, the charge that Clinton launched cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan to divert attention from Monica Lewinsky, attacked the US for not signing the Kyoto Protocols, ect. It's also the same reason why his minion Adam Gadahn brought up the issue of same-sex marriage in his own video to America - because by invoking these issues and either claiming or opposing them, they know that the ultimate effect will be to divide us. The more divided we are, the less focused we are on fighting him, and that goes for both sides of the political spectrum.

We agreed with the general commander Muhammad Atta, may Allah have mercy on him, that all operations should be carried out within 20 minutes, before Bush and his administration would become aware. We never imagined that the Commander in Chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face this great horror alone when they needed him most. It seemed to him that a girl's story about her goat and its butting was more important than dealing with planes and their 'butting' into skyscrapers. This allowed us three times the amount of time needed for the operations, Allah be praised.

This is bin Laden's first public acknowledgement that he ordered the 9/11 attacks, so maybe Reuters and the BBC can finally get around to ditching their disclaimers that we "blame" the attacks on him. As I said, this criticism of Bush, which I myself first heard aired publicly from widow of one of the 9/11 victims during the commission hearings, was featured prominently in Fahrenheit 9/11 and has since been echoed in a number of other circles since. The similarities between these remarks and those in the film are too great in my mind to be ignored and were probably deliberately framed by bin Laden in those terms.

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or Al-Qa'ida. Your security is in your own hands, and any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.

There was some commentary on this last part from a number of Islamist internet forums affiliated with al-Qaeda. The term used here for "state" is, as noted by MEMRI, wilaya, which in Arabic usually means some kind of a subdivision with a nation or a province. An independent country, by contrast, would be referred to as dawla.

Given some of the things they say in those forums - bin Laden controlling the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, having access to Soviet chemical and biological weapons, US soldiers engaging in cannibalism and rape in Iraq, etc., I would generally describe the denizens of al-Qaeda forums like al-Qala as knowing less about the intended strategy of the al-Qaeda leadership than you know about the intended strategy of George W. Bush or Condoleeza Rice.

Nevertheless, MEMRI thought it valuable enough to note the following from al-Qala:

This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, 'Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,' it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn't treat all American people as if they're the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections."

And this bit from al-Islah, a similarly affiliated band of nuts:

"Some people ask 'what's new in this tape?' [The answer is that] this tape is the second of its kind, after the previous tape of the Sheikh [Osama bin Laden], in which he offered a truce to the Europeans a few months ago, and it is a completion of this move, and it brings together the complementary elements of politics and religion, political savvy and force, the sword and justice. The Sheikh reminds the West in this tape of the great Islamic civilization and pure Islamic religion, and of Islamic justice..."

Uh huh.

Analysis and Implications

I don't take nearly as upbeat a view of this as do Wretchard or the MEMRI staff, both of whom, like Greg (and wouldn't you like to know whether or not I knew that tape was going to be broadcast ;) I have nothing but admiration and respect for. Apart from faux Fahrenheit stuff, I did notice 2 distinctive themes in both this message:

1. Bin Laden's adoption of Wilsonian rhetoric and painting himself as a champion of freedom and democracy in the Islamic world. To put this as best I can, if the US shifts policies and ditches the neocons' pro-democratization initiative the way a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment are hoping for, he appears ready to pick up the tab as best he can. Basically, in the absence of responsible people leading the pro-democracy movement in the Middle East, bin Laden is positioning himself to pick up the tab. This represents a shift in strategy as much as anything else, as it represents a tacit concession that his own Salafist "base" isn't enough to defeat the US. If he were a politician, I'd say that he was trying to move to the center in a bid to win the general election.
   
   
2. Bin Laden's ability to compromise his fanaticism and desire for power with a sophisticated political savvy and pragmatism is an extremely dangerous one. If he's really starting to adopt the same kind of friend/foe distinctions among his Western enemies that he apparently does among his fellow Muslims (allying himself with Shi'ite heretics, for example), then he might be open to making overtures to them for his advantage. Neither political party in the US is going to be open to his overtures, but can we really say the same of Europe? Or North Korea?

As far as why bin Laden broke cover now, less than a week before the presidential election, I have no idea. If this tape is what everyone says it is, with him simply seeking to influence the election, I'll sleep quite happily for the next month. My fear is that it's a signal (and the lack of "chatter" isn't all that reassuring to me - was there any before 3/11? Or the Chechen attacks in Russia in late August and early September?) for some kind of an attack, possibly to take place after the election so that he can claim that he offered us mercy and we refused to take him up on it. I also think that there's another kind of strategy at work here, one that nobody really wants to talk about either out of partisanship or because nobody wants to think about it before an election.

Assuming bin Laden knows enough about American society to understand how news cycles work, he knows that by releasing his tape when he did is going to ensure that his was the last major news cycle before the election. This has a definite benefit to it, at least from his perspective, because he ensures that whoever wins come Tuesday, the losers will attribute their opponents' victory to him. So if we don't manage to get another Florida this time around, he's just ensured that we're going to have one for the next 4 years.

Addendum

I wasn't planning to go here, but apparently some people simply have not gotten the message yet so I'll repeat it as loud as possible yet again from my bully pulpit:

1. I no longer work for AEI or Michael Ledeen. That ended when I left DC. Period. If Dr. Ledeen wants me to work for him again (or the reverse) I will be more than willing to serve, but I do not work for him now nor am I any kind of a portal for his views on these subjects. My thoughts on Iran, al-Qaeda, the war in Iraq, et al. are my own and always have been, not Dr. Ledeen's or AEI's. If you want to know what Dr. Ledeen thinks about a particular issue or subject, my advice would be to ask him, not me.
   
   
2. Dr. Ledeen does not advocate an invasion of Iran, but rather prefers to achieve internal revolution inside the country. Disagree all you like, but it's at least prudent to understand something about his position before you start criticizing it. It's kind of like the simultaneous claims that are often thrown about made that he supports the goals of both the Mujahideen-e-Khalq or the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty. Both claims are false, but if they were both true it would be quite a confusing thing to do given that they're mutually exclusive.

Hopefully that puts the final nail in the coffin on that subject.