Bin Laden Wins
Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, informs us today that Osama bin Laden has won - big - in his attacks on America.
From bin Laden's standpoint, this has been a glorious victory, made possible, it has to be said, by the totally unforeseen incompetence of the Bush administration. It was so intent on going to war in Iraq that it would not finish the job in Afghanistan. So, to bin Laden's absolute amazement — I am guessing here — the United States took on his enemy, the secular and ungodly Saddam Hussein, whom bin Laden himself would gladly have murdered. It has to be a wonderful thing when your enemy vanquishes your enemy.
On "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Dick Cheney said that if he had it to do all over again, he would still go to war in Iraq — "we'd do exactly the same thing," he said. Why? Is the man incapable of learning from experience? We now know from umpteen reports that there was no link between bin Laden and Hussein. We now know, the Weekly Standard notwithstanding, that Mohamed Atta did not meet in Prague with someone from Iraqi intelligence. We now know that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraq war — which has cost America more than 2,500 lives, 20,000 casualties, the respect of the world and billions of dollars — is for naught. Talleyrand said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. It will be said of Cheney that he forgot everything and learned nothing.
How did bin Laden get so lucky? How did he get so fortunate in his choice of enemies? The Bush administration not only validated his wildest dreams — dreams that even some of his aides thought were unrealistic — but went even further. By using torture, by the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, by employing "extraordinary renditions" of suspects to countries where they could be tortured, by insisting on going it almost alone in Iraq, by telling the international community to shove it, by declaring a war for an idée fixe – this fierce obsession with Hussein goes back a long way — the United States has made itself reviled in much of the world.
The Islamists have demonstrated - repeatedly - that they read the Western press to see how they are doing. They engage in a fierce propaganda war on a daily basis against the West in general and America in particular. They literally repeat back leftist and defeatist rhetoric they see in the media, hoping for a positive feedback effect, where the amplitude of the feedback keeps driving the system into total failure. Go look at what that sort of failure does by searching the web for what happened to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (I won't link it, you'll have to work a bit for this one).
So in a way, Cohen is right. When bin Laden reads the defeatist, irresponsible, foolish and myopic statements of someone like Cohen, he will believe he has won. He's already beaten Cohen. That didn't take a lot, one suspects.





