The Fantasy World of Radical Islamists

Iraq Pundit treats us to his latest commentary regarding Iraq. It’s titled Jazeeraland

Bin Laden's statements used to be followed by a chorus of Western terror "experts" who pronounced his timing "exquisite," his message carefully honed, etc. He's still manna to the quaking cable networks, of course, but the days of the admiring reviews seem to be over. When OBL tried to intervene in the last U.S. presidential election, nobody could agree on just what he was trying to tell the American electorate. If anything, he helped get Bush re-elected. Last time he spoke, he offered the West a truce. The West flipped him off.

This time around, Richard Clarke told one network that OBL "seems to have been reduced to being a commentator on Islamic news." For someone as sensitive to mass perceptions of who is a "strong horse" and who is a "weak horse," his equine decline must rankle him.

Naturally, I was most interested in OBL's comments about Iraq. Who, OBL asks, is the real criminal in Iraq? His answer is that the true crimes were the sanctions that harmed Iraqi civilians even as Saddam got richer. OBL was also deeply disturbed at stories about the use of depleted uranium. His heart bled copiously at the "propaganda campaigns" that he says have "attacked" the Iraqi population. These, says OBL, are acts of malice.

As for those attacks by car bombs that have ripped apart the bodies of so many Iraqi men, women, and children, he forgot to bring them up. That murderers acting in his name and with his approval have specifically targeted little kids, markets filled with women, places filled with mourners and with wedding guests, all that was too trivial to mention. OBL keeps his eye on the big picture. He's out to save Islam, no matter how many Muslims he has to murder in the process.

The latest hard fought round of political progress in Iraq is a good sign that the pro-democracy forces are winning the war on terror, even if complete victory might be decades away. Let's hope more Arabs and Muslims around the world look to the way the Iraqi political leadership dealt with their political disagreements and reject the "Osama model" of political "dialogue."