Bin Laden, Beware

...When he passed away, the truly violent spiritual furnace of Iran's Islamic revolution went out...

...When bin Laden dies, things, too, will get better...

...He will never stop bombing us...

...The pragmatist inside never stops searching for some deal that will allow the avaricious and sybaritic side of human nature to triumph over messy, abstract idealism...

...The call to search for "the roots of this problem"—which inevitably implies that we have done something wrong, and until that something has been corrected we can expect others to be mean-spirited—will no doubt return, at least on the left-hand side of America...

...It doesn't mean that we fire cruise missiles for a couple of weeks at the Taliban (though that would be a good beginning...

...On September 11 American rationalism got fuel-bombed by a force whose mores are hopelessly irreconcilable with our own...

...Israel's loss of nerve in Lebanon and its "flexibility" in the peace process were, of course, complemented and much compounded by America's increasingly inept handling of an ever-stronger Saddam Hussein...

...Like Iran's ruling clerics, the Saudi militant reminds his listeners that the West not only physically invades the Muslim world (U.S...

...Unless we get extraordinarily lucky, which means the Pakistanis actually become effective clandestine allies or the Taliban lose their nerve, we aren't going to be able to assassinate bin Laden through proxies or a Delta Force commando squad...

...But if we kill bin Laden, the champion of the movement will have been defeated in battle...

...The British did it in 1898 on the plains outside of Omdur-man, where they defeated the holy warriors of the Mahdist regime in Sudan, with cannon-fire and Gatling guns...

...The collapse of the World Trade Center is in this sense, for an Islamic holy warrior, the most potentially promising victory since the Ottoman Empire took Constantinople in 1453...

...Indeed, an important part of the evanescing of American power in the Middle East since 1991 has been precisely due to the impression that America and Israel were tiring of the Israeli-Arab confrontation, that they both wanted, with increasing urgency through the 1990s, an escape from the costs and unpleasantness of the cold war between Israel and its Arab neighbors...

...The CIA's problems with counterterrorism are enormous, and they are systemic...

...To defeat bin Laden and his kind, we have to restore our awe, and the only way you acquire and retain such majesty in the Islamic Middle East is through the use of military power...

...Yet we always want to avert our eyes from such burning light and believe that there must be accessible solutions to abate the anger of two opposing sides...

...they certainly do not spring, as former President Bush recently suggested, from human-rights restrictions on clandestine operations (would that CIA case officers even saw terrorists, let alone worried about the morality of recruiting them...

...Also, the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon was a catastrophe for Israel, and by extension, us, because the Israelis demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were wearying of the fight...

...For bin Laden and his holy warriors, and the Middle Eastern audience to which they constantly play, it was blindingly obvious by 1998, when Al Qaeda struck the U.S...

...Little, slavish, Westernized dictators and kings, according to bin Laden, now rule the Muslim umma, the community of believers...

...For Usama bin Laden, the Saudi holy warrior, and for the true-believers who converted civilian airliners into missiles, the hand of God really did take down the World Trade Center's twin towers...

...In Western Europe and Canada, very neat, tidy places, we can already see what's brewing...

...military can kill bin Laden...

...He knows how to play the passions of the oldest clash of civilizations...

...Bin Laden's awe, which has primarily been built upon dead Americans, will become ours...

...If you can repeatedly maul the United States, the spiritual cutting edge of Western civilization, and get away with it (and the Clinton administration's feeble attempts to punish bin Laden with cruise missiles and court cases certainly gave no impression that America was defending its turf), you simultaneously degrade the West's ideals, which is the ultimate objective...

...Holy wars are exceptionally ugly because they offer no escape from a guerre a outrance—even if only one side believes that God is at their backs...

...military bases in the Persian Gulf, Israel) but culturally and spiritually pollutes the Muslim soul...

...The bombings in New York and Washington may well confirm what the attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, strongly suggested—that either or both the Hezbollah of Lebanon (which means the ruling clergy of the Islamic Republic of Iran) and Saddam Hussein helped accelerate the learning curve of bin Laden's kamikazes...

...We will still have other holy warriors to deal with...

...Barak's concession on East Jerusalem was, of course, the coup de grace, giving Arafat and everybody else in the Middle East the impression that Israel, and America right behind her at the negotiating table, had gone completely wobbly—or to put it in the way most often reported in the American press, Israel had shown unexpected flexibility, moderation, and courage...

...This is an obvious point that bears repeating, since, as we seriously start thinking about how we are going to reply to this horrendous assault, American rationalism is likely to reenter the debate...

...We can look back hundreds of years to the Wars of Religion, where Christians rapaciously killed each other over matters of faith...

...And this is definitely a fight to the bitter end, which means first and foremost that we must eliminate Usama bin Laden...

...But when we down him and take back the awe that is ours, we will have turned the tide...

...The fate of the Bush administration, which just a week ago focused on the economy, education, and the Social Security lockbox, will surely hinge on how well it fights this war, which means at the moment whether the U.S...

...embassies in Africa, that America was on the run...

...Saddam Hussein did a somewhat better job...

...It also means that we have the political and cultural stamina to sustain American troops in Afghanistan for as long as necessary to track down and kill bin Laden...

...It must also show, as it didn't in the Gulf War, its staying power...

...The Ayatollah's charisma wasn't transferable...

...He has made a rag-tag outfit of Islamic militants, his terrorist umbrella organization Al Qaeda, in just a few years the most celebrated holy warriors in modern Islamic history...

...Only Ayatollah Khomeini rivaled bin Laden in audacity and scope of vision...

...As we can already tell, the war against Usama bin Laden will be for the Middle East and us a defining experience...

...He will never stop recruiting others to the cause...

...After eight years of World War I-style warfare against Iran, Saddam finally cracked the holy-warrior, death-wish spirit that had infected an entire nation of young Iranians...

...The liberal in us wants to believe that humanity is bound by hope...

...What hasn't been fully appreciated in the West is the extent to which bin Laden and the other radical Islamists in his orbit have a domestic, Middle Eastern agenda...

...The painful integration of the Muslim and Western worlds, which has been relentlessly moving forward for more than two hundred years, will then continue, God willing, with less bloodshed on both sides...

...We should immediately bury the thought in the Iraqi ashes of the Agency's last covert-action fiasco...

...It means that we get up-close and personal, as Winston Churchill did at Omdurman...

...Bin Laden, far more effectively than Saddam Hussein, has been tweaking the nerves of Islamic civilization, which has experienced 300 years of defeat by Western armies but vividly remembers a millennium of triumphs over Christians and Jews...

...We can of course look back to communism and fascism—the West's most recent attempts to bring heaven to earth—and better appreciate the ideological fire that produces a moral imperative to kill women and children...

...We can look at Northern Ireland's troubles and glimpse, just barely, divinely sanctioned warfare...

...It also means that America must be prepared to inflict immense damage on any other terrorist organization or terrorist-supporting state, even if that means we have to scorch southern Lebanon or Revolutionary Guard dormitories and depot facilities in Tehran...

...And bin Laden intends to smite them both...

...Even a first-rate intelligence service, which of course takes years to build, would still have a very difficult time tracking the activities of Usama bin Laden...

...The United States obviously cannot and should not dominate the Middle East in the manner of the Ottoman Empire, but it can show, as it did in 1991, that it can deploy awesome firepower...

...If we are going to defeat bin Laden, his allied holy warriors, and others who have supported them, we are going to have to understand that friendship for and partnership with the United States in the Middle East primarily hinges on American power...

...Bin Laden has been trying to show that a band of faithful Muslims can, with the right weapons in the hands of death-wish believers, reverse the history of the Muslim world...

...With their liberal, lonely hearts working overtime, the Israelis threw themselves into the peace process in exactly the way the Department of State had always wanted: Concessions became the sine qua non of Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's negotiating style...

...The battle against terrorism won't be "the new warfare of the twenty-first century...

...They want to drive the West, physically and spiritually, out of the Islamic world, which means at home intimidating, preferably annihilating, backsliding Muslims who are far too comfortable with Western ways...

...Bin Laden didn't do this, of course, all by himself: He has in all probability received critical assistance from other terrorist organizations and Middle Eastern states...

...As Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Hafez al-Assad of Syria, who both squashed fundamentalist threats to their power, would advise, martyrs in the Middle East are a dime a dozen...

...Logistically, we obviously cannot allow ourselves to be held hostage to the fickleness of our allies, who support us now but may not support us so enthusiastically when CNN starts broadcasting the bloody images of America's revenge...

...We may have to commit the necessary resources and manpower to topple Saddam Hussein...

...We can certainly expect guilt and anxiety to return to the op-ed pages as soon as America starts to punish bloodily those responsible in the Middle East...

...frontation, so the State Department has always told us, is obviously the epicenter of the anti-American hostility throughout the Middle East...

...We are, indeed, fortunate that we do not have to deal with a large country that exalts young men who ride across mine fields on motorcycles...

...After that, we will just have to persevere and slowly burn the hope out of Islam's holy warriors...

...it's going to be nineteenth-century warfare in the twenty-first century...

...The assaults on America's embassies, ships, and cities and the recent kamikaze attack on Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famous (particularly in the Middle East), awe-inspiring commander of the anti-Taliban Afghan opposition, show clearly that he can do both...

...The key in these conflicts, and so many more in Islamic history, was demonstrating with frightful clarity the indefatigability of the triumphant power...

...Nevertheless, Khomeini and the Iran-Iraq War (19801988) are helpful reference points for us now, as we design our battle plans against bin Laden...

...This is, of course, news to Usama bin Laden, as it is to Ayatollah Khomeini's faithful followers, who don't seem to think that five million Jews in Israel have sufficient stature to be the "Great Satan" in their battle between Good and Evil...

...It took years, but Saddam Hussein did it with artillery, machine guns, land mines, and flaming oil pits...

...With bin Laden dead, we will no doubt see again Americans slaughtered by Islamic holy warriors...

...Bin Laden, Beware Here's how to break the spirit of the holy warriors BY REUEL MARC GERECHT If you are an American, raised on a diet of Western rationalism, it is difficult to understand the idea of holy war...

...As we calculate the costs, we will be inclined to deceive ourselves with easy, silver-bullet solutions...

...The Ottomans in 1514 broke the invincible spirit of the holy warriors under the ultra-radical Iranian Shah Ismail at the battle of Chaldiran with musketry and sword...

...And, it's worth-while to recall, the United States had a devilish time trying to handle Khomeini...

...Second, you can crack the holy-warrior spirit through combat...

...Of course, this doesn't mean that we cruise-missile an empty pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and rock-hut training camps in Afghanistan...

...We can confidently expect that Israel will somehow be blamed for this mess, since the Israeli-Arab conReuel Marc Gerecht is director of the Middle East Initiative of the Project for the New American Century...

...The idea of covert action will no doubt rise again...

...But it is bin Laden, not the leaders of Hezbollah, Iran, and Iraq, who has become the poster boy of anti-Western hostility throughout the Middle East...

...Better intelligence"—how often have we heard that hopeful phrase?—isn't going to save us now from making the hard military decisions...

...and we will still have other terrorist organizations and terrorist-supporting intelligence services to confront...

...It absolutely does not depend on whether Israel makes all of the concessions that Yasser Arafat wants...

...The pacifist in our hearts doesn't want to believe that people can see violence as an expression of fraternity and love...

...The Central Intelligence Agency, which has probably never seen bin Laden coming unless a foreign security service, or the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency, gave them a tip, is incapable of conducting such operations...

...First, when Khomeini died in 1989, things got better...

...As long as he lives, we have lost the war against radical Islamic terrorism...

...It does not depend on whether Washington pursues policies our Middle Eastern "allies" like...

...His magnetism within militant Islamic circles is undeniable...

...And we shouldn't fear bin Laden's becoming a martyr...