More on Usama from slate.com

[noel]

Interesting:

Experts on al-Qaida have also made the opposite point to Krauthammer's: The jihadists know that the United States is not going to capitulate in the war on terror, so the terrorists are better served by having a polarizing figure such as Bush in office. His actions, such as the invasion of Iraq, the argument runs, have aided the jihadist movement because they confirm its view that America is the ineluctable enemy of the Muslim world. The idea that by taunting Bush days before the election, Bin Laden would actually pump up his support appears widely accepted among foreign commentators, as a Google search of foreign stories on the videotape will show. Why is it inconceivable that the al-Qaida leadership couldn't also see it this way? They do, after all, study us closely. (As someone who has found his articles from scholarly journals analyzed on jihadist Web sites, I'm all too aware of this.)

The argument has the virtue of being consistent with other aspects of al-Qaida thinking. Fittingly for a group that seeks global revolution, al-Qaida has a Leninist streak: That is, they seek to maximize the tensions between the revolutionary force and the existing power structure. (Odd, isn't it, how Cold Warrior types like Krauthammer resist this notion, insisting instead on seeing the terrorists as "medieval primitives"? Both Abu al-Ala Maududi, founder of modern Islamism in South Asia, and Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian theorist who is a central inspiration for Bin Laden, were deeply influenced by Leninism.)

We know, for example, from a late December 2001 video message that Bin Laden anticipated and welcomed the U.S. retaliation against Afghanistan for the 9/11 attack, and he seems to have been delighted to hold this up as another example of American bloodthirst. It was a central part of his public-relations campaign to win support among Muslims. Similarly, his message shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq practically crooned with pleasure about the prospect of a U.S. military deployment that would proving again his argument about America. This may seem bizarre, but Lenin was thrilled by the carnage Russia suffered in World War I and rightly saw it as weakening the Czarist regime. We commit a dangerous mistake if we refuse to recognize that the jihadists are capable of such strategizing.

[Crav]

No way terrorist can't have any "strategery". They're all just a bunch of sheep herders that live in caves!