The Horse’s Mouth
The full text of the latest Bin Laden message. It confirms that Bin Laden’s plan is long-term economic warfare:
Don’t let your strength and modern arms fool you. They win a few battles but lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are much better. We were patient in fighting the Soviet Union with simple weapons for 10 years and we bled their economy and now they are nothing.
In that there is a lesson for you.
The whole message is, of course, a big ol’ threat, couched in a lot of unctious “sympathy” for the plight of the American fighting man. But the threat is much less “we’ll blow you up and make you dead bwa ha ha!” than “we’ll blow you up and at the end of it you’re bankrupt and maybe nonexistent.” As I read it, he’s more interested in scaring Americans about their country’s power and prestige than about their lives.
You might argue that Bin Laden has seized on the grand economic warfare claim from expediency – he hasn’t chased the US out of Iraq; he hasn’t landed another blow inside the United States; there is, today, but a Caliphate of Caves for him to rule. I’m biased because I’ve been arguing the economic warfare thesis for over four years now; the thing is, it really did work in Afghanistan, so it’s reasonable to think Bin Laden and his brain trust would think it could work against the US.
What it means is that any fiscally profligate endeavor is, to coin a phrase, objectively pro-terrorist. That ought to worry people more than word games.
Even so, Bin Laden has at least two major problems: 1) The US economy is much larger and more sound than the Soviet economy of the 1980s; 2) As a democracy, the US does a better job of getting out of pointless wars than totalitarian governments do. We did eventually leave Vietnam and within a decade our global prestige was higher than it had been beforehand. In another half decade our largest enemy ceased to exist. We wound down the war in Korea in only three years.
Meanwhile Bin Ladenism has only ever managed partial control of two of the planet’s biggest shitholes, Afghanistan and the Sudan.
Comment by Nell —
January 21, 2006 @ 11:56 am
fighting the Soviet Union with simple weapons for 10 years
Umm… and then they got Stingers and started taking down a helicopter a week, and then they won.
Comment by Nell —
January 21, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Also: Afghanistan wasn’t the worst place in the world in the 1970s, before the war. Agreed that it met your description by the time the Taliban took over.
Comment by the talking dog —
January 21, 2006 @ 1:33 pm
Actually, I think bin Laden has inadvertently seized on Chinese national policy: convince us that we have to spend obliviously to combat a future super high tech Chinese threat, while the Chinese themselves never actually develop the capacity to project military force more than a few kilometers from the Chinese border… but as we spend on this, running up our deficits and otherwise weakening the rest of our economy by devoting resources to the folly, the Chinese merrily fund our deficits and buy up our duly underpriced assets with the paper… it works for the Saudis that way too…
Funny all that.
Fact is, we now devote around 20% of our national government’s budget, or around 5% of GDP give or take, on defense… at a time when the rest of the world cumulatively spends less than that.
You’ve got to hand it to the current American regime that it has managed to keep up this mania despite our not having any actual real enemies on anything approaching a scale to be an existential threat, by conflating a criminal enterprise to the Nazis, Soviets, Klingons and Romulans all in one irrational-fear-generated fell swoop. Well done.
Bin Laden’s appearances, as helpful as they have been to the Bush cause, are always interesting. Nice of him to fill in some good sound bites for the State of the Union address.
Comment by Bill Arnold —
January 21, 2006 @ 8:07 pm
I suspect (there have been words aluding to this in AQ statements) that AQ’s interest in the ”we’ll bleed them to death economically” argument stemmed from a realization of the enormous ROI achieved with the World Trade Center (& other 9/11) attacks, something like 100,000 or 1,000,000 to one (depending on how one counts the Iraq war). (That was one of my very early reactions as well.)
One wonders how the WoT would have proceded if we had focused on dismantling AQ and spent the 100 billion a year we spend on Iraq on other measures. e.g. 100 billion in bribes goes pretty far in the developing world….
Comment by Gary Farber —
January 23, 2006 @ 12:51 am
”Meanwhile Bin Ladenism has only ever managed partial control of two of the planet’s biggest shitholes, Afghanistan and the Sudan.”
And chunks of North and South Waziristan in Pakistan.
Parts of Yemen, as well.
Comment by Gary Farber —
January 23, 2006 @ 9:25 pm
”It confirms that Bin Laden’s plan is long-term economic warfare….”
Incidentally, I’m confused as to why you think this needs ”confirm[ation].” He’s repeatedly stated exactly that a number of times. His November 2004 statement, for instance.