(2004-09-16) Cole On Binladen Goals Success

Juan Cole on Osama Bin Laden's goals, and success so far. From the point of view of AlQaeda, the Muslim world can and should be united into a single country... since the UnitedStates was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United States first... In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the U.S. into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the U.S. military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri's recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy. The U.S. cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground. Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq (War On Iraq) for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan... It remains to be seen whether the U.S. will be forced out of Iraq the way it was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a huge victory.