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 uesday's
report was that the Bush administration had persuaded United Nations
officials in New York that Osama bin Laden was indeed responsible
for September 11. And the next day's feature was that there is a
discernible enfeeblement of the Taliban government, while warning
that the northern dissidents have a way of exaggerating good news,
desiring the political effect of it — which is to suggest that
the protectors of bin Laden are on their last legs.
All of which
requires us to meditate on the centrality of bin Laden.
Suppose that, tomorrow, his life ended. Whether by suicide, assassination,
or execution. Suppose, then, that the Taliban government, holding
up for the world to view the severed head of bin Laden, were to
say: Well, here you are. Kindly return to your secular pursuits
and call an end to your hysteria.
While it is
true that bin Laden has served as the incarnation of the evildoing
of September 11, we know that an end to his life would not mean
an end to his movement. About some historical figures it can be
said that their movement depended on the longevity of the leader.
When Napoleon was finally deposited in St. Helena, his movement
ended. The assassination of Hitler would almost certainly have brought
down Nazism. The serial deaths and depositions of post-Stalin Soviet
leaders (Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko) affected not
at all the stamina of the Communist movement. The people who have
cheered on bin Laden are, most of them, in the streets of Islamic
capitals, others in furtive retreats about the world, in the 50
countries in which it is estimated the terrorists lurk, hiding and
plotting. Something more than the head of bin Laden is required
to short-circuit the grid that binds the terrorists in their envious,
fanatical designs on the free world. What is needed, surely, is
the head of Saddam Hussein. He is more than the symbolic enemy of
the West. He is the historical aggressor in that part of the world,
aggressor against Kuwait, dogged and impenitent cultivator of apocalyptic
weaponry.
Mr. Bush and
his team have as difficult an assignment as has ever faced any great
country, to wit, the pursuit of an impalpable enemy. It isn't like
a war against a foreign capital, army, and navy and imperial outposts.
It is more like a war against a microbe: Find it first, then attempt
to destroy it. If you can find the matrix, kill it. If there are
matrices, find them, kill them. The principal matrix is Saddam Hussein.
We have the
enormous advantage of the cautious blessings of Moscow. Mr. Putin
smiles on the cooperation of Uzbekistan with our Secretary of Defense.
Putin has to play it carefully. On the one hand, Russia does not
wish to appear simply anti-Muslim. On the other hand, it has a great
deal to fear from Muslim extremism in the southern tier of former
Soviet states. Russia has had a hideously expensive firsthand experience
with the attempt to conquer or even to subdue mobilized opposition
as in Afghanistan, separatist opposition as in Chechnya. It bears
constant repetition that moderate Muslim regimes have the most to
fear not from the West but from their own unruly fundamentalists.
In Indonesia, the East Timor convulsion of two years ago forced
us to acknowledge that the non-democratic military were the wedge
against the non-democratic Muslim extremists. In today's scene,
we have the fortuitous geophysical situation abutting Afghanistan
and Iraq. The Iranians have opposed Saddam Hussein against whom
a war was fought. The Pakistanis need relief from their own extremists,
seemingly anxious to link arms with bin Laden.
But if he is
gone, link arms with whom?
The defense
against the extremists goes beyond bin Laden. We need to guard against
any sense of sufficiency that might delude the West with his elimination.
That is why the vector of American military and economic effort
should bring Saddam Hussein to the crosshairs of our effort. September
11 was nothing more than a little excursion manipulated by Osama
bin Laden, never mind what we told them up at the U.N. It was the
pustulation of an international movement the most discernible feeding
ground of which is in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.
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