Osama Bin Laden has again found the courage to supply a video tape to Al Jazeera urging the faithful believers of Al Qaeda's Ideology to continue fighting towards the goal of an all powerful Islamic Caliphate to rule the lives of humans. Tigerhawk analyses the content of the message and asks a very telling question. Why is there no mention of Iraq?
Bin Laden Changes the Subject: Less than 2 1/2 years ago, al Qaeda broke the news to the Taliban that it was diverting resources to Iraq so as to humiliate the American "Crusaders."During the Clinton years America acted as if Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are a criminal organization, completely missing the point that they are the leaders of an ideological movement with growing support in poor and poorly governed Islamic countries and circumscribed Muslim enclaves.
All this was on the orders of bin Laden himself, the sources said. Why? Because the terror chieftain and his top lieutenants see a great opportunity for killing Americans and their allies in Iraq and neighboring countries such as Turkey, according to Taliban sources who complain that their own movement will suffer... Bin Laden believes that Iraq is becoming the perfect battlefield to fight the “American crusaders” and that the Iraqi insurgency has been “100 percent successful so far,” according to a Taliban participant at the mid-November meeting who goes by the nom de guerre Sharafullah.
Al Qaeda drew a line in the sands of the Sunni Triangle, and the United States Army and Marines walked right across it. First, al Qaeda tried to kill Americans, per bin Laden's orders. It largely failed. Then al Qaeda went after America's allies, and succeeded only in turning public opinion against itself in every Muslim country it attacked. After thirty months of battlefield defeats and political embarrassments, bin Laden won't even mention Iraq in one of his rare public utterances, and he rallies his troops to fight a war where American soldiers aren't. How humiliating. How delightful.
Al Qaeda has lost in Iraq, and bin Laden is desperate to change the subject. He and his organization are at grave risk of being discredited, and when that happens it will be much harder for al Qaeda to attract recruits, raise money, or deal with governments.
Al Qaeda leadership has consistently been able to use the success of their actions as validation of their principles. Success against the Russians in Afghanistan, followed by one terrorist attack after another against the United States culminating in the unexpected fall of the twin towers. All of these are offered as proof of divine favor. Success attracts money and followers, so the way to defeat an ideology is to dry up the financing and the new recruits by demonstrating for the entire world to witness, one defeat after another. After a while it becomes less and less credible to claim you are doing God’s work on Earth while hiding under the ground in a cave and smuggling out messages.
