Joe Bob's America - Spiting Osama's Nose

Spiting Osama's Nose

By Joe Bob Briggs
April 28, 2003

NEW YORK, April 28 (UPI) -- A strange schizophrenic debate has been ebbing and surging on conservative web sites the past few days, as various people opine about what exactly it is that Osama Bin Laden wants and whether Donald Rumsfeld is giving it to him.

There really shouldn't be any question about what Bin Laden wants. He stated it plainly, and at great length, in his 1998 declaration of jihad against the United States. He wants American troops removed from Saudi Arabia. And he goes into religious reasons why armed infidels can't inhabit the land of Mecca and Medina.

So when Rumsfeld announced this week that America would be shutting down its air bases near Riyadh--something the Saudi royal family has always wanted, because of the religious heat they take from the fundamentalists--there was a curious sort of hiccup in the normally 100 percent approval of Rumsfeld. No one was actually criticizing Rumsfeld, but the feeling was, "Well, isn't it a little too soon?"

Not really. If you have air bases in Iraq, you can reach any place in the Middle East. We don't need Riyadh anymore.

"Well, isn't it kind of sending the wrong message?"

No, it's sending exactly the right message. We had an immediate practical reason for keeping troops and weapons in Saudia Arabia, and that reason was Iraq. To not pull them out after the threat is gone would be to say we had some other reason for being there, and there aren't any good ones.

"Well, aren't we giving Bin Laden what he wants?"

Yes, we are. Why is that a problem? Isn't it better to rob him of one of his ideological reasons for jihad? To say we should stay there just to annoy him is saying we'd like to spite Osama's nose to cut off our face. (Not that his nose doesn't make a large and attractive target.)

Actually we were doing all kinds of good things for Bin Laden this week. The President's announcement that we were committed to a Palestinian state is also a goal of his 1998 fatwa. And then there's the fact that we eliminated the Ba'ath Party in Iraq. Bin Laden considered them infidels, too.

The most curious thing about our war against Al Qaeda is that we feel this constant need to evaluate their feelings, and know how they might react to this or that initiative. Who cares about their feelings? When we put a gang member on trial for shooting an old lady, we don't wring our hands over what his motives might have been or whether he thinks our justice system sucks.

So what's really going on here?

I don't think you can conclude that it's anything other than an attempt to justify everything within the framework of vengeance. The yearning to tie anything we destroy to Bin Laden is to somehow make certain that if we fire a weapon, kill somebody, save somebody, spend money, seize money, or do anything in the international arena, it has the secondary satisfying effect of hurting, foiling or angering Bin Laden. If you don't make the Bin Laden connection, then the action falls into ambiguity, and you know how we hate that.

I personally don't think the killing of Bin Laden would be a good thing. I think it's much better for him to live on in impotence, with an organization that gets weaker by the day. He's a sick man anyway, and it's better to have him leading Al Qaeda than some young successor who might have a clearer mind and better organizing skills, and whose first act would probably be to get rid of the name Al Qaeda and go on working in some more secret way.

We've succeeded in demonizing the name "Al Qaeda" to the point where Bin Laden can't use his favorite banks or recruit in western countries, so we have a perverse stake in making sure the shell of it remains. Anyone within that orbit is fair game for target practice. Once you descend into some other alphabet soup of ambiguous Islamic organizations, it becomes difficult to sort out the players and the motives. Anyone crazy enough to join Al Qaeda at this point is painting a big red billboard across his chest that says, "Shoot me."

Seen that way, who cares if they're celebrating tonight in the Al Qaeda clubhouse in South Yemen? Yes, the U.S. troops are leaving Saudi Arabia. Yes, the Palestinian state will happen. Yes, the Ba'ath Party is gone.

Osama Bin Laden, I assure you, has no real emotional reaction to any of this. He's wondering where his ass is.

Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.

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