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| Dealing with Bin Laden |
| 2001-09-15 |
Reuel Marc Gerecht, another former U.S. intelligence officer, has a piece in The Weekly Standard offering some insights into bin Laden's motives: What hasn't been fully appreciated in the West is the extent to which bin Laden and the other radical Islamists in his orbit have a domestic, Middle Eastern agenda. They want to drive the West, physically and spiritually, out of the Islamic world, which means at home intimidating, preferably annihilating, backsliding Muslims who are far too comfortable with Western ways. . . . If you can repeatedly maul the United States, the spiritual cutting edge of Western civilization, and get away with it (and the Clinton administration's feeble attempts to punish bin Laden with cruise missiles and court cases certainly gave no impression that America was defending its turf), you simultaneously degrade the West's ideals, which is the ultimate objective. The collapse of the World Trade Center is in this sense, for an Islamic holy warrior, the most potentially promising victory since the Ottoman Empire took Constantinople in 1453. The only way to defeat Bin Laden is to kill him, Gerecht adds: With bin Laden dead, we will no doubt see again Americans slaughtered by Islamic holy warriors. But when we down him and take back the awe that is ours, we will have turned the tide. After that, we will just have to persevere and slowly burn the hope out of Islam's holy warriors. The painful integration of the Muslim and Western worlds, which has been relentlessly moving forward for more than two hundred years, will then continue, God willing, with less bloodshed on both sides. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |