Will U.S. Be an Unwitting Tool in Bin Laden’s Game?

To begin to understand the tragic and puzzling events since Sept 11, we may have to move beyond the logic of terrorism. The terrorist’s aim is to inspire fear and create chaos in a target population. Suppose instead that Osama bin Laden is not a terrorist but a revolutionary. If so, his aim is not merely to harm the United States but to provoke us into a massive military retaliation.

President Bush’s statement that the United States will take action against both the states that harbor terrorists and the terrorists themselves (if we can find them) would be, in this view, precisely the desired outcome of last week’s attacks.

In addition to being a strategic and organizational genius, Bin Laden is also an idealist: He believes that the governments of the Islamic world are essentially corrupt dictatorships, ineffectual in the face of U.S. and allied imperialism; therefore they cannot do right by the Islamic people.

He is, of course, not far from the mark.

Many of these states are corrupt and ineffectual, and few of them care about most of their impoverished people. If the United States attacks some of these states, their regimes would certainly be destabilized.

Now that Bin Laden and his followers have sown the wind, they stand ready to reap the whirlwind. He is already the most popular political figure in the Islamic world: Osama is the second most popular name, after Mohammed, for male children there.

Bin Laden intends to lead this revolution for his own benefit and that of his followers. What he needs is the momentum necessary to bring about revolution in weak and illegitimate Islamic regimes. If Bin Laden is behind last week’s actions, as Washington indicates, he has ensured that the United States stands ready to help him.

To understand this line of reasoning, it is important to appreciate something about the challenges of leading a revolutionary movement. The key problem is to not convince followers of the rightness of the leader’s ideas--most people in the Islamic world accept Bin Laden’s ideas readily--but rather that there is hope of succeeding. After all, the United States and its allies are the uncontested hegemons of the world system.

Once the Soviet Union provided an alternative vision of the future, and it lent its support to radical movements throughout the world. Think Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh. But the Soviet Union is no more, and no other power has emerged to take its place. China, once a candidate, has now applied for membership in the imperialist club; it seeks entrance into the World Trade Organization. In this monopolistic world system, how can a revolutionary leader attain the credibility necessary to mobilize a revolutionary force?

Bin Laden has found one answer. In the attack, he has shown that he can be successful in wounding the seemingly invincible power. This will embolden his followers and attract legions of new ones. More important, however, he may well have succeeded in mobilizing a powerful and unwitting revolutionary force against Islamic states. That force is the U.S. military. Just as the terrorists used our commercial air system to attack symbols of American wealth and might, Bin Laden would use the U.S. military as a battering ram against the weak and corrupt regimes of the Islamic world.

If we don’t retaliate, Bin Laden will try to provoke the U.S. by other means. If we do, we court the prospect of revolution.

It appears that Bin Laden may have put us between a rock and a hard place. For the moment, he seems to have the upper hand.