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Osama and Jack the Ripper
 One
angry reader calls me an
“appeaser” for a recent
column in which I denied that
al-Qaeda poses a “totalitarian threat” to this
country.  In
this business one gets used to having one’s little
feelings hurt, but the pain soon passes, often giving way to reflection.
The word appeaser
belongs to a legacy of slogans from World War II and the Cold War, which
are being forced into service for the War on Terror, to which they
don’t apply. It’s hardly “appeasing” an enemy to
define him in his true dimensions. Jack the Ripper was a bad sort of
person, but not a totalitarian threat — just a brief menace to a
certain class of women in a certain part of London.
Nevertheless, when people are
frightened they lose all sense of proportion, and the Ripper’s
fiendish murders terrified respectable people to whom he posed no threat
at all. He probably sold millions of newspapers — the only mass
media of his day. Imagine the impact he’d have had in the age of
television. Jack kept the public good and jumpy with periodic letters to
the newspapers, rather like bin Laden’s occasional videos. Then,
mysteriously, he stopped killing women. Did he change? We’ll never
know.
“Terrorists,” as the
term implies, want to scare people. Television is extremely helpful to this
purpose, especially when it can actually show us their crimes. The events
of 9/11 were immeasurably less destructive than last month’s
giant tsunami, but you’d hardly know it from the media coverage.
Just
before the November 2 election, Osama bin Laden released another video, causing
speculation that he was trying, as his own words seemed to imply, to help
John Kerry win, though some speculated that he was cleverly trying to
help President Bush win by using reverse psychology. But here is a
different assessment, from the Egyptian newspaper Al-
Ahram (quoted in Commentary magazine):
![[Breaker quote: Fighting phantoms]](2005breakers/050111.gif) If this reading is correct, bin Laden may now be so weak that he has even given up bluffing. Maybe his
past threats have achieved their purpose, and nothing further is to be
gained by making more of them, with the U.S. Government taking extreme
security measures and his own resources stretched thin. His personal
wealth, after all, was much less than the United States spends in a single
day in Iraq. Is he reasoning that the time has come for a new strategy?
One of subtly offering to appease the United States? Or is he playing some
other head game? In any case, it’s fantastic to imagine him
conquering America, let alone ruling it. Terrorists are rarely conquerors.
I’ve suspected for some
time that al-Qaeda shot its wad on 9/11. This is impossible to prove, but
the follow-up attacks we expected haven’t come to pass. We have
long since ceased worrying about anthrax in the mail and sealing our
houses with duct tape. Most of us are feeling a bit sheepish about the era
of John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge.
The war in Iraq, of course, seems
only tenuously related to our former fears, especially to those Bush
obsessively encouraged about Saddam Hussein and mushroom clouds. Like
bin Laden, the president has quietly changed his tune. His War on Terror
has morphed into something completely different: a War for Democracy.
The “terrorists” he now speaks of are those who want to
disrupt this month’s elections in Iraq; nobody thinks they pose any
menace to life in America, or that they draw much of their power from
al-Qaeda.
It’s not just the rhetoric
of World War II and the Cold War that seems old-fashioned: Bush’s
urgent alarms about post–9/11 dangers are already passé. The
country was geared up for a phantom enemy and a huge war we never had
to fight. And we’re still fighting it.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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