[iwar] [fc:bin.Laden's.grand.miscalculation]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-27 19:37:55
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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by Tom Grant

October 26, 2001

Tom Grant is the Warburg Research Fellow at St. Anne's College, Oxford University.

bin Laden's grand miscalculation

by Tom Grant

Osama bin Laden, as best anyone can tell, wants Muslims to unite in a
grand alliance, with him at its helm.  The concept is not new.  The
British confronted the Mahdi in the Sudan in the 1890s, and this fanatic
rebel, too, fancied himself a millenarian leader, bound to unify all
believers under a banner of conquest and vanquish the infidel.  The
Mahdi in the Sudan failed, because, confronting the premier military and
economic power of the day, his own forces were puny, and he lacked the
means to recruit followers even to communicate his message beyond his
immediate environs.  Osama bin Laden in key respects is a far more
dangerous and cunning opponent than this and other forebears.  However,
in an extraordinary irony, he and his cause could meet with an even more
resounding defeat.  Whether or not he forges a Pan-Islamic movement
united against the West, bin Laden is near to triggering the
establishment of an alliance far more fearsome than any conceivable
alignment of Muslim countries.  America, Russia, and China -- a weight
that indeed no other geopolitical combination whatsoever could withstand
-- may well and indeed should on bin Laden's provocation themselves join
together in an alliance no less grand than that he hopes to create
against us. 

The plan bin Laden has formulated to achieve his world- spanning aims
involves a simple progression: commit acts of unbridled terror against
America, causing America to retaliate against one or more Muslim
countries and thus provoking Muslims into a single enraged community
eager to elevate bin Laden to the status of messiah he so craves.  The
Saudi dissident has gone about his work with some cleverness.  Take his
manipulation of the media and opinion in the Muslim world.  First, he
has avoided public credit for the attacks of September 11, and polls
show that most Arabs, ignoring the outrageousness of the proposition,
believe that the United States itself orchestrated the devastation in
Washington and New York, in order to furnish pretext for an attack on
Muslims.  Second, our response well-measured by objective and historical
standards is believed by most Arabs and many Muslims beyond the Arab
world to constitute a terrific and bloody assault on millions of
innocent civilians.  So effective has this part of the bin Laden gambit
been, that one suspects that if the United States did no more than send
a politely worded note to Kabul requesting an apology, Near Eastern
opinion nonetheless would hold that neo-crusaders had unleashed against
Muslims a form of apocalypse.  Thus the Muslim world, fuelled by false
premises and gross exaggeration, lurches toward unity. 

Meanwhile, U.S.  Secretary of State Colin Powell focuses on knitting
together a hodgepodge of disparate countries to work alongside us in
rooting out terrorists.  Great emphasis is placed on bringing multiple
Muslim countries into the "alliance," even as it becomes ever clearer
that some of the Muslim countries at the heart of Powell's planning
contain such radicalized polities that their participation is mere
fiction.  Turkey, exceptionally, stands firmly with us, and Pakistan,
though a powder keg of Islamic discontent, may yet fulfil its pledge of
support.  Beyond these countries, however -- and even between the two of
them, Pakistan remains a question mark -- the situation is grim.  To
build the "alliance" that the United States now so emphasizes, we have
had to find common denominators for all the states we aim to incorporate
into it.  Combining a welter of Arab and other Muslim states with
various western countries, themselves of widely varying resolve, makes
for a geopolitical structure so loosely defined and unstable as to have
no meaning at all.  bin Laden may well be creating a Muslim alliance of
broad scope, focused on his own fanatical goals, whilst the alliance we
have aimed thus far to build must remain a mirage. 

Secretary Powell's alliance, while perhaps placating European
fence-sitters, has little chance of serving any purpose in the actual
combat that must ensue.  The interests of the constituents of that
mirage of an alliance are simply too varied and, moreover, their
perceptions of the threat we now face too divergent for them to agree to
meaningful action in concert.  But three countries do share fundamental
interests and, more importantly, do share similar perceptions of the
threat.  Our leaders should recognize that the United States, Russia,
and China are the logical alliance in the war against Islamic terror. 

Americans on September 11, on our own territory, witnessed the fury of
radical Islam.  But Russia has confronted this problem for some time,
and the leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has upbraided the United
States for failing to understand the nature of the problem his
government confronts in Chechnya and other Muslim regions of the former
USSR.  China's leaders have shown little tolerance for religious
movements of any stripe when these hint at challenge to the state.  And
China, though much further from the headlines, has also struggled with
Islamic radicals, Chinese officials, for fear of assassination, long
dreading service in the western, Uigher-inhabited reaches of the
People's Republic.  That Chechen and Chinese Muslims have joined bin
Laden at his camps in Afghanistan tightens the link. 

Countries, absent a clear threat, very seldom have bound themselves
together in pursuit of peacetime objectives.  We should be careful
before assuming that the multiple rounds of GATT talks represent
anything like the norm.  Defense against a common danger, by contrast,
has proved a prime mover in the creation of geopolitical alignments.  It
happened against Frederick the Great, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler. 
Fear of communist encroachment kept the long- feuding states of Western
Europe together even longer than in the past.  To be sure, the risk of
natural disasters, ranging from smallpox to ozone depletion, more
recently has also produced broad-based co-operation, but these projects,
though carried out in time of peace, are themselves essentially
defensive. 

The attacks of September 11 finally brought into focus that the world
faces a new threat demanding concerted action.  Not just isolated cells
of suicidal holy warriors, but vast stretches of Muslim opinion have
arrayed themselves in battle formation.  Their goal is to destroy the
international order as we know it, even though they can offer nothing to
replace it.  This enemy, then, follows in the footsteps of the very
worst revisionists of the past.  The response, just as in the past, must
come, not from disparate minor players and the ranks of the revisionists
themselves, but, rather, from the premier incumbent powers of our day. 
That is to say, the alliance against terror must center around the
largest and most powerful members of the system that is now in peril. 

America, Russia, and China their differences notwithstanding constitute
the core of contemporary geopolitical incumbency.  The position of
America in this is clear enough, for our power and prosperity are
unrivalled and radical revision of world order is never the vocation of
the premier state in the international system.  China has found a
formula for political stability and economic growth at home and
enhancement of diplomatic power abroad.  The current trajectory, in most
its features, suits the People's Republic very well.  It may appear
that, of the three powers, Russia is the one least possessed of the
attributes of incumbency.  But to assume that Russia has less interest
in preserving the current world order would ignore cardinal facts. 
Russia remains, in territorial extent, the largest state in the world. 
It possesses the first or second largest arsenal of thermonuclear
weapons, along with the means to deliver them.  Its resources are vast,
and income from hydrocarbon exports growing.  Russia, like the United
States and China, holds a permanent seat on the Security Council of the
United Nations. 

Herein lies the fatal flaw of bin Laden's strategy.  He has declared his
intent to revise the world order in radical ways.  This is bound, at the
very least, to put the incumbent powers on guard to protect their
position.  But bin Laden has done much more than that.  By carrying out
mass destruction on the very soil of the premier power and forming a
support network that aids violent and disruptive Muslim radicals
everywhere, he also threatens the domestic security of the incumbent
powers.  In this, his challenge is unlike that in the past when
disaffected groups have tried to revise the way the world functions. 
The Mahdi at Khartoum did nothing to threaten Britons on their own
shores.  America, China, and Russia, by contrast, today face far worse
than a disadvantageous reshuffling of international rank.  Defeat in the
present contest would not simply entail lowering our flags at distant
outposts.  The means our enemy has chosen to effect his desired
reshuffling of international order imperils our very domestic order as
well.  Toward America, China, and Russia, then, bin Laden has posed a
threat of unparalleled unifying potential.  It is a double threat: to
unseat us all as international powers and to deny us tranquillity even
at home.  His scheme of alliance-building is quite simply in the process
of backfiring on a scale of epic proportion. 

The present motions of international diplomacy as led from Washington,
DC give only veiled indication of the emergence of a tripartite
super-pact.  But the forces of mutual interest and mutual perception of
threat work their own logic.  If the Islamic revisionists were to carry
out more attacks against civilians on our own territories, then progress
toward unified action amongst the three great powers might well prove
inexorable.  It may well be that unified action is about to happen in
any event. 

President George W.  Bush, meeting in Shanghai with his Chinese
counterpart, President Jiang Zemin, appears to have obtained a
meaningful commitment from China to fight terrorism.  Perhaps more
tellingly, the leaders agreed that there is a need to protect global
stability.  This begins to sound like incumbent powers at last
recognizing the fundamental similarity of their interests in the face of
a revisionist threat.  Just as striking are recent words from Russia
suggesting a willingness to accommodate the United States on missile
defense and even on NATO expansion.  It could be that the go-ahead from
Moscow some weeks ago to permit American forces to deploy in the former
Soviet territory of Uzbekistan signalled that the Russia-United States
leg of the triad was already in place.  It also bears noting that
shortly after the Shanghai discussions between Bush and Jiang, Pakistan,
a state over which China exercises considerable influence, increased its
commitment to the war on terrorism by announcing that "alliance forces"
would be using a major base in the west of the country. 

Bin Laden has miscalculated.  He may or may not yet prove able to foment
a Muslim uprising of great breadth, but, by inadvertence, he seems to
have made a far more potent alliance nearly inevitable.  Only a
strategic blunder even greater than his own will prevent the United
States, China, and Russia from joining now in common cause to protect
the order and security of which they uniquely are guarantors.  Selected
Recent FPRI Bulletins Available Upon Request

AMERICA AT WAR
Afghanistan After The Taliban, Alvin Z. Rubinstein, 10/15/01
Why We Fear Afghanistan And Why We Shouldn't, Michael Radu, 10/12/01
September 11: Before And After, Adam Garfinkle, 10/01
Cold War II, Walter A. McDougall, 10/01
America's War Against Terrorism, Alvin Z. Rubinstein, 10/1/01
September 11: Ten Ways To Look at What Happened and What To Expect,
Michael Radu, 9/17/01
Bleak New World, Harvey Sicherman, 9/13/01

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