Steve Gilliard has a provocative blog entry called Al-Qaeda and you. Some highlights:
Osama Bin Laden is not a fascist. He is not seeking to dominate the world. Attaching islam to it makes no sense. WHy? Because that isn't what they're about. Osama and friends are Islamic revivalists. Which means that they want to return to the 13th Century and the days of the Caliphate. This is not a new movement, but a repeated challenge to state power for at least 200 years, but it is utopian in nature. It has a history predating fascism and little in common with it. It is just a cheap way for chickenhawks to feel they are engaged in some new struggle... ...The fact that Bush and the GOP has shamelessly used Al Qaeda to get reelected has obscured the real threat from Al Qaeda. First, AQ is not some vast network of millions of angry Arabs. Osama is the religious Che. People use his image as a way to stick it to the man. His image basically says fuck the state. While there are hard core supporters of Osama, the reality is that AQ is the new Bader-Meinhoff gang or the Japanese Red Army, disaffected graduate students who are pissed that they do not rule the world. The 19 men who attacked the twin towers were middle class Saudis and Egyptians, people who could have had good lives in their countries or the west, but they were so pissed, that they decided to use violence to create their utopia. Why? Becuase it was a lot more fun to play terrorist than work for a living. There are thousands in their ranks, but the few people who are dangerous are able to hide in the masses of the disaffected. And since we have mangled our relations with the Arab world so seriously, AQ membership is a status symbol, like being a Black Panther... ...Osama Bin Laden has one goal and it isn't the destruction of the United States. It is to replace the Saud family with the Bin Laden family in running Saudi Arabia. No matter how much he cloaks his intentions in religion, his real goal is power. Osama is like so many rich dillitants who tire of a life of rent girls and casinos, and gets attached to a cauise. The life he should have lead would have made him a rich sybarite, with European mistresses and fat bank accounts. But with that life, he would have to obey the Sauds, and coming from the second family of Saudi Arabia, he wondered why it wasn't the first. His plan to overthrow the Sauds comes through the US. If he can weaken the US, then the Sauds have no place to turn. And given the complete corruption of that family, AQ gains in Saudi Arabia have been profound. And of course, Bush has inflated then ignored Osama as it served his purposes. He wanted to overthrow Saddam for any number of reasons, none of which had anything even remotely related to the security of the United States, but when time for the switch came, he told the American people and the Congress that Saddam was the real mastermind behind 9/11. A story only wingnut crackpots believed, but a lie which served their purposes all too well. The only problem was that Iraq was the best thing that ever happened to Saddam Osama. Not only is it a live fire training ground for the motivated, it has trapped a large proportion of the US Army in Iraq. Every soldier patrolling Tikrit is one not patrolling the Hindu Kush. Osama couldn't be happier with this turn of events. Not only are US troops occuiped in a soul-killing, machine-destroying war, one which is shrinking the pool of potential recruits, he has 150,000 targets... ...The only way to protect the American people is to have Muslims realize that Revivalists will harm them more than help them. The racism of American policy shines through. We want freedom in Lebanon, but don't care if Egypt ever has free elections. We talk about elections in Iraq, but never say a word about the disnefranchisement of Saudi women. Arabs are not stupid, they are not blind. They see the hypocrisy and the lies and the abuse of the Palestinians and they treat our words as lies. American policy under Bush has hindered our war on terror not enhanced it. The one greatest thing we could do to enhance our standing within the Arab world would be to ensure justice and stability for the Palestinians. This is the signature issue in the Arab world. They don't care about the farce of the Iraqi parliment or Lebanon. They care about Palestine and as long as Israel tries to deal with the Palestinians as subjects and not equals, AQ will always have a cause to rally around.Read the whole thing