Cult Leader and His Toadies

In the videotape the Bush administration released Thursday, Osama bin Laden recalls an associate’s dream that seemed to presage America’s Sept. 11 nightmare. “ ... We were playing a soccer game against the Americans,” Bin Laden says. “When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots! ... Our players were pilots.... The game went on and we defeated them. That was a good omen for us.”

In the grainy tape, apparently recorded last month in Kandahar, a smug and soft-spoken Bin Laden allows that he was pleasantly surprised by the destruction, for which he seems to take ample credit. “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy.... I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would ... collapse the area where the plane hit and all the [World Trade Center tower] floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.”

But more than just convincing evidence that Bin Laden was behind the attacks, the tape offers a surreal look at what historian Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” It is an air kiss to Bin Laden by his toadies, a quick tour into a noir world of twisted fanaticism. Liberally sprinkled with references to dreams, prophets and jihads, the tape cements the image of Bin Laden as heir to a long line of messianic tyrants, some secular but many who claimed that a divine hand guided them to slaughter innocents and ensured them a reservation in eternal paradise.

“Allah be praised,” comes the refrain of a sycophant as Bin Laden relishes the pleasure he derived from his mayhem. “Allah prepares for you a great reward for this work.”

In one of his characteristically oblique comments, Bin Laden notes that people will always rally round a strong horse and disdain a weak one. Like each of his messianic forebears, he reveals no foresight as to how quickly evil men lose the reins of power. Adolf Hitler, whose Third Reich was to last a thousand years, was vanquished after 12. Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Jim Jones and so many other apocalyptic cult leaders received not the thanks of a grateful people but defeat, ignominy and death. Now, the Taliban has collapsed and Al Qaeda is on the run; Bin Laden, serene and supremely creepy on tape, seemed clueless as to how far his star had fallen since his big day in September.