I guess bin Laden issued a statement about Obama going to Saudia Arabia today. Certainly the usual rabble rousers of the Republican party--the ones that make me thing about becoming an Independent--are on their hobby horses again.
Sometimes I picture myself at a press conference answering questions, like, "President Schenck, how would you respond to Osama's depiction of your Middle East trip as an attempt to spread hate?"
My response: "Osama who? This is a guy who lives in a cave half the time and every once and a while manages to scribble a note and get it out to the public. Yes, it was a failure of the previous administration to bring him to justice. But really, this is pretty much one guy who got lucky a couple times. One of those times was catastrophic, to be sure, but I give no credit of brilliance or significance to the man who planned it. He got lucky.
"There are some fundamental misunderstandings that were a part of the previous administration's response to this little man. First, they responded to a spider when he is a starfish. With a spider, you hit it on the head and it's dead. You can take the battle to the spider. But with some starfish, almost every part will regrown into a complete starfish again, even if you cut off every arm.
"Terrorism is not a spider. You can't really take the battle to terrorism, because it's potentially everywhere. The previous administration either misunderstood this fact or it saw 9-11 as an opportunity to pursue a secondary agenda in Iraq. If the latter was the case, we can at least admire it for its cunning, for a broader plan that had good intentions but that at least so far has failed to yield the intended results. If the previous was the case, then the pursuit of Saddam Hussein was about as misguided as the French investors who tried to figure out who the president of the internet was before they would invest--and of course with a cost of thousands of American lives and ten thousand Iraqi lives.
"In the process, bin Laden was empowered far beyond the power he had previously. He went from someone on the edges of Islam, despised by those in power in the Muslim world to someone with real symbolic power. Our war in Iraq took someone on the run from his own people, who was denounced by almost every Muslim nation after 9-11, to someone who inspired forces in these nations that those in power now had to deal with on a grander scale. A more conservative regime managed to get elected in Iran, largely because of the American invasion of Iraq.
"Another mistake of the previous administration is that, realizing how much trouble the legs of the starfish caused (themselves still thinking of it as spider legs that would stop if they could just bop its head), they tried to burn the whole starfish. This was practically the approach of the Israelis in Lebanon a couple summers ago. At some point, however, the loss to innocent life is so overwhelming that the only ethical--and reasonably strategic thing to do is to live with disappointment.
The ancient Syrians did this with the Maccabees. They finally realized that it was stupid to keep fighting and losing so many just so that the Jews would "modernize" and stop strange customs like circumcision and not eating pork. The Russians did this in Afghanistan in the 80s. We did it in Vietnam. The Spanish did it with the Apache. You don't try to defeat a starfish. You isolate and insulate its parts. You make sure it isn't where you are or want to be.
"So let's dismiss this Osama person. He's a has been. That part of the starfish is locked up in a box."
I don't know if Obama's mission to the Middle East will accomplish anything. But it's a lot smarter than what the last guy did. It can't hurt.
