So is Osama bin Laden truly "evil?" Most people who lost family members at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 would probably consider him to be evil. Was President Ronald Reagan evil? Most residents of Beirut who lost family members when the USS New Jersey rained 2,700 pound Mark 7 shells on residential neighborhoods in 1983 during the Lebanese Civil War probably considered Reagan to have been evil. Bottom line? Bin Laden is no more evil than other revolutionary leaders in other times or even than ordinary national leaders who propel their countries to war for "national honor," or to acquire the resources of others, or even to "do good."
So if bin Laden, if looked at dispassionately and analytically, is neither absolutely "crazy" nor utterly "evil," what is he?
Bin Laden is a serious and wily adversary who knows how to manipulate the Arab "street." He is intelligent and well-informed-- clearly far better informed about the U.S. and the West than the apparatchiks and their bosses in the current White House are informed about him and his region of influence. Bin Laden thinks strategically and takes the long view; he is tactically flexible and is not afraid to retreat to attain an ultimate strategic advantage. Unfortunately for the U.S., he probably has a 40 point I.Q. advantage over the current occupant of the White House.
In short, we should not risk underestimating bin Laden by dismissing him out of hand as "crazy" and "evil."
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Even if Osama bin Laden ends up serving as the revolutionary catalyst for some regime changes in the Islamic World, it will be the societies themselves that will reorganize, reconstruct, and manage themselves. Bin Laden will never become some sort of menacing, all-powerful "Caliph," and given the ethnic and national differences within the Arab and Islamic Worlds, neither will anyone else. Such a threat is a bogeyman created by the willfully ignorant or the merely delusional.
The U.S., if it is sensibly introspective about its true "vital" interests before its self-infliected wounds become critical, may yet manage to remain prosperous and survive as one great power among several.
But the U.S. simply cannot afford to behave like a global hegemon, especially an eagerly interventionist one, in perpetuity. The U.S. economy cannot sustain such a role.
Is it not time to turn away from following bin Laden's agenda, which, oddly enough (as bin Laden himself observes) is congruent with the neoconservative agenda and the corporatist agenda: seeking more U.S. military interventions in the Islamic world, resulting in more violent resistance to U.S. military occupations, more strain on the U.S. economy (and perhaps even a structural breakdown), more fissures in U.S. alliances, and ultimately the collapse of the "American Empire?"
Why is the U.S. playing a game with the rules set by Osama bin Laden?
Are we truly stupid?
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