Osama's truce - prelude to an attack?
I've been meaning to post about Osama's last message, but William S. Lind at Antiwar did it better.
Osama bin Laden's latest message. Most observers, including the White House, seem to have missed its significance. In it, bin Laden offered us a truce (an offer we should have accepted, if only to attempt to seize the moral high ground). The Koran requires Muslims to offer such a truce before they attack. The fact that bin Laden himself made the offer, after a long silence, suggests al-Qaeda attaches high importance to it.Why? My guess is because they plan a major new attack in the U.S. soon.
He goes on to speculate that this would be a bigger attack than 9/11.
Of course, I certainly don't know what bin Laden is planning. But the attempt in the US to portray Osama as an idiot and his messages as lunatic ramblings is not a good approach. I’ve read enough to suggest that these messages are carefully thought out, have a purpose and that, hard as this is to imagine, he says what he believes.
We should regard him as a smart opponent, a dangerous one, and a skillful one. After all, look how he has hamstrung the post powerful nation in the world, made us spend hundreds of billions of dollars and – for all we know – has basically no one operating inside our country. After all Bush hasn’t managed to arrest too many operatives so far.
Again, I don’t know. I don’t know what he is planning, luck has played a role in his success as had the stupidity of BushCo. But it is a wise warrior who studies his enemy carefully.