The Chicago Way

Donald Sensing writing at One Hand Clapping has perhaps the best analysis of the Osama Bin Laden videotape: bq. Police Officer Jim Malone to Eliot Ness: "If Capone comes at you with a knife, you go after him with a gun. If he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone!" bq. I am wondering whether bin Laden has started to realize that since 9/11, America has been fighting al Qaeda the Chicago way. Consider the evolution of his rhetoric until yesterday. Donald then gives some quotes from Bin Laden from 2001 onward and offers the following observation: bq. No longer does bin Laden call America the "weak horse." No more is he threatening to humiliate America and force its soldiers to flee homeward in fear and disgrace. Now he is practically doing a Monty Hall routine, asking, "Let's make a deal." bq. The Islamist triumphalism is absent. In fact, if Osama bin Laden could dance he might be imitating Fred Astaire: "Let's call the whole thing off!" Or maybe Great Garbo, "I want to be let alone." What he was certainly saying boiled down to this: if you leave us alone now, we'll leave you alone. No matter how insincerely he means it, he did say it, and it can't be gaining him new recruits to jihad. Jihadis don't die to be let alone, but to defend Islam itself. bq. The words on the videotape are not the words of a man who thinks the light at the end of the tunnel is anything but the headlight of the proverbial oncoming train. This was the tape of a man who knows his tail is getting whipped from one end of the world to the other. He's now out of ideas and even out of new threats. The extensive quotes of the Quran as in tapes of yore seem AWOL now. Very good stuff... My only concern is that if the USA agrees to back off and give them a break, they will view this as Hudna -- a truce for the purpose of re-grouping and waiting until the strength is back. Given how we are marshaling our troops for a push into Fallujah right now, I somehow do not think this is the case, for which I am very glad...