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| Terror Networks |
| Steyn: Osama doesnÂ’t matter any more |
| 2006-01-26 |
| So they decide to take the precaution of bogging them down in Afghanistan. In post-Watergate Washington, you can’t 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 CIA’s, agrees to pony up the cash and run the recruitment ads, and Pakistan’s 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 they’d overthrown the Soviet Union because the Great Satan was a big sissy who was too scared to do it himself. Now what’s left of al-Qaeda’s 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 won’t 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 can’t blame Osama or whoever makes his audio tapes for being confused. I’ve written before about the media bubble — the tendency of Democrats and the press to reinforce each other’s illusions. But I’m saddened to think you can be halfway round the globe in some of the wildest turf on earth where no state’s 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 he’s winning against us. And right now, as that whiney loser cassette tape suggests, they’re 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? He’s not what it’s about any more. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #1 This is just an excerpt... tipper's teasing us. Go to BugMeNot for a Spectator (http://www.spectator.co.uk) login. This puppy's 5 pages long - and well worth the read. "It is almost four years since I mooted that the bin man had gone to the virgins. If he hasn’t, then I wonder what he makes — beyond the desperate ‘truce’ gambit offered as a cynical enticement to Democrats and Europeans — of the way things are going. Afghanistan will never be his again. The House of Saud’s double-game is a lot more one-sided these days. And, as the visit of General Musharraf’s Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to Washington made plain, the prospect of Talebanising Pakistan has slipped beyond Osama’s grasp: the AQ Khan network has been busted up, there are said to be American ‘observers’ at the nuke facilities, and the ISI, the country’s deeply duplicitous intelligence service, is on a tight leash. President Bush underlined to Shaukat Aziz this week that America intends to continue exercising its right of hot pursuit and either send choppers into Pakistan to seize suspects or cut to the chase and blow up their homes. On the whole, Musharraf is cool with that: if someone has to incinerate remote villages, he’d rather it was the Great Satan. For his part, Bush is happy for the General to be as co-operative as he can without getting assassinated. Eighteen people died in the attack on Damadola, and OK, some of them were women and children, but others were men Osama can ill afford to lose, and at one of the three houses reduced to rubble his Number Two, al-Zawahiri himself, is known to have swung by for dinner from time to time. Sorry, but that’s war: you have the enemy round for cocktails, your pad’s on the target list from then on. And yes, it means your wife’s sister, who’s never been terribly political and indeed didn’t utter a word all night, gets incinerated with the al-Qa’eda mastermind. ‘Message: I don’t care,’ as George Bush Sr might say." |
| Posted by: .com 2006-01-26 12:05 |