The Guardian, Wednesday October 10, 2001Just days into this conflict, a dread thought surfaces: what if Osama bin Laden is winning this war? The television pictures tell the opposite story. He is the frail man relying on a stick, hunted quarry chased into a cave. Ranged against him are the mightiest forces in the world, a superpower wielding multi-billion dollar weaponry, backed by a string of wealthy, well-equipped allies. Surely, as Tony Blair told the world via the Labour party conference last week, "This is a battle with only one outcome: our victory, not theirs."
That would be true if this was an ordinary war, the kind between states. If this were a battle with Iraq or Serbia, the result would be pre-ordained. But this belongs in a category all its own. The differences are obvious: Bin Laden is a leader without a country and his "troops" are disciples scattered and hidden across the globe, making a conventional attack on him impossible. To eradicate al-Qaida through an air assault is like destroying a flu virus with a sledgehammer: it cannot work.
But that is only part of the difference. For this war's defining characteristic is the centrality of propaganda. What are clashing here are not two armies, but two arguments. The US-led coalition's case is that this is not about the west vs. Islam, but the world against terror. The lead rhetorical advocate has been Tony Blair, who this week took his message to the Arab world directly via an interview with the suddenly-hot satellite TV channel, al-Jazeera.
Bin Laden has been no less eloquent, presenting his case via that same TV station on the very night the bombing began. (Spin doctors the world over can only applaud the skill of his media operation: Bin Laden may be an evil terrorist, but he's clearly read the Clinton-Blair book of rapid rebuttal.) His version is the direct opposite of the one pushed by Blair and George Bush. "These events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels," he declared. For him, this is not the world against terror, but Islam against everyone else.
The question immediately becomes: which version is prevailing among the people that matter - the people of the Arab and Muslim world? London and Washington insist that Arab and Muslim governments accept their view that the object of the current onslaught is the Taliban and al-Qaida and no one else. But the people of the Muslim "street" do not seem to see it that way. For all the reassurances supplied by kings and despots, large sections of their peoples - we cannot call them electorates - have sided with Bin Laden. Indeed, they regard the current bombing offensive as utter confirmation of his key message: that America and its allies will always seek to crush poor, Muslim peoples wherever they may be.
Accordingly, they have rioted on his behalf across Pakistan, Indonesia and the Gaza strip. They have brandished his face on placards and hailed him as a champion of "the Islamic nation". So-called moderate Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, have refused to grant the US even the military cooperation they provided during the Gulf war, so fearful are they of seeming to collude with the Great Satan. In contrast with the 1991 conflict, the night war on Kabul has been conducted without the military help of a single Muslim country. Even here in Britain, Muslim leaders - despite Blair's insistent pleading that this fight has nothing to do with Islam - have refused to lend their endorsement. Blair personally wooed the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain at Downing Street on Monday, but it made no difference: Yousuf Bhailok still called for an immediate halt to the war.
In other words, few in the Muslim world see an attack on the Afghan regime as a long-overdue assault on a barbaric dictatorship. Many, perhaps most, see it as an attack on them. They do not denounce the Taliban and cheer their probable collapse; they see them as brothers, the newest victims of the western "crusade" to humiliate Islam. On this they agree with Osama bin Laden.
The intensity of street-level reaction has exposed a glaring hole in the western coalition's case, the same hole that lay at the centre of the debate that raged here and in America after September 11 on the "clash of civilisations" theory pushed by Harvard professor Samuel Huntingdon. To trash the idea, Blair and others constantly said the west has no grievance with Islam. But they never paused to wonder how Islam felt about the west. Bin Laden insists there is absolutely a clash of civilisations - and, so far, from Quetta to Gaza, they're cheering him. With typical arrogance, most western thinkers assumed Huntingdon's thesis was all about us; we forgot about them.
Our leaders have filled the gap by making assumptions about the Muslim world. It has been comforting hearing Sheikh Anthony Charles Lynton Blair and Mullah George Walker Bush tell us Bin Laden-ism is a desecration of the peace-loving faith that is true Islam. But it would have been more reassuring if similar verdicts had come from koranic scholars of even greater rank than the British PM and US president. There has been criticism of Bin Laden, to be sure. Yet so far neither the ayatollahs of Iran nor the grand muftis of Cairo and Jerusalem have ostracised him from on-high as an enemy of Islam - there has been no fatwa against him.
It's not difficult to understand why few of Islam's most senior clerics have condemned him as a blasphemer. Most of them are tied to governments that are fearful of sparking an Islamist revolt. But that is hardly any more comforting. For what emerges is a picture of a Muslim world where either vocal and growing minorities idolise Bin Laden or governments fear standing against him. Either position confirms the hopelessness of a western propaganda campaign to isolate him.
This prompts a bleak practical conclusion: this war is truly a no-war situation. To capture and put Bin Laden on trial would be to create a focus for Islamist anger, and to further inflate his legend. Killing him would create a martyr whose death would have to be gruesomely avenged. Alive he would carry on wreaking murderous havoc. Every option is a victory for him and defeat for us.
And so even I, who hold no brief for knee-jerk anti-Americanism or knee-jerk pacifism, am left feeling deeply ambivalent about this war. I wonder if it will pass the basic, Blairite test - what's best is what works - or if it is about to make a grievous problem even worse. I worry that we may have played directly into Bin Laden's hands, following a script he's been dreaming up these last five years - inadvertently proving that America and Islam are locked in an epic clash of civilisations after all. I wonder if it would have been smarter to have taken out the men of the al-Qaida network one by one, quietly and in the dead of night, rather than giving Osama bin Laden this spectacular war he craves.
I wonder if he is not celebrating in that cave of his - celebrating the war he has already won.
