Osama bin Laden, like Mick Jagger, cannot relinquish the microphone. The Al Qaeda leader is warbling again, in a tape evidently recorded late in 2005 and aired this week by Al-Jazeera. This audio recording carries the familiar chords of platinum oldies, with bin Laden once again threatening attacks on America, once again offering his enemies a truce.
For more than four years, bin Laden has been taping promises to again assault the U.S. with the ferocity his disciples showed on Sept. 11, 2001. Many people in this country take him seriously. Gallup pollsters reported last week that 45 percent of Americans think it’s likely that 2006 will bring “a major terrorist attack” here. A slim majority of 51 percent thinks such an attack is unlikely.
Such widespread fear of his prowess must encourage bin Laden, although that probably doesn’t explain the timing of this tape’s release. Al Qaeda’s more urgent concern is the worldwide impression that, without warning, U.S. missiles obliterated several of the group’s most senior leaders in a Pakistani hamlet last week. How better for bin Laden to counter apparent defeat than with visions of victories to come?
The reaction to the tape Friday in much of the European press was that bin Laden, with his boasts of terror successes in Iraq and promises of more attacks, did a favor for George W. Bush. The president’s critics chafe each time he calls Iraq the central battlefield of the war on terror and not, as many of them believe, a diversion from that war. But bin Laden’s relentless obsession with Iraq suggests that he and Bush agree: As Iraq goes, so, perhaps, goes that larger war.
And the operative word is “war.” Bin Laden’s sporadic rants are reminders that we’re fighting one. Americans lulled into complacency by his failure to stage more grand attacks here now have a fresh reminder that he is as committed to our extermination as we must be to his.
His vague offer of a truce was, though, new proof that he often gets things wrong. There will be no U.S. truce with Al Qaeda, not with Bush in the White House. Bin Laden made a similarly loopy suggestion in April 2004, offering to halt terrorist operations in European countries that withdrew their militaries from Muslim nations (presumably Afghanistan and Iraq). But his effort to drive a new wedge between the U.S. and Europe didn’t yield much.
His call for an Iraqi boycott of last January’s hugely successful national election also flopped. And his assertion in the new tape that the majority of Americans want U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq is off the mark; Gallup rushed out a clarification Friday, reporting that 26 percent of Americans currently want all U.S. troops withdrawn. In short, this country’s resolve to defeat his acolytes in Iraq isn’t as flimsy as bin Laden has been claiming, delusionally, since 2003.
For all his bluster about more attacks, though, it’s likely bin Laden spends much of his time with an uneasy truth. Somehow, the Central Intelligence Agency learned that several Al Qaeda heavies would be in that Pakistani hamlet. How, bin Laden must wonder, did the CIA get that information? From a spy? From an infiltrator? From an eavesdropped conversation? From an e-mail intercept?
Whatever the answer, its implications must be as unnerving for bin Laden as his threats of annihilation are for many Americans. Ask not, Osama, for whom the missile-armed drone next searches. It searches for thee.
