Jonathan Schwarz has an excellent catch based on entries from Osama bin Laden's journal:
In one passage, Bin Laden wondered how many Americans would have to die in U.S. cities to force the U.S. government to withdraw from the Arab world. He concluded that it would require another mass murder on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks to spur a reversal in U.S. policy, an official said.
So…it turns out bin Laden's real, private motivation was exactly the same as his stated public motivation: to stop U.S. intervention in the mideast.
Click on over there to see the rest of his analysis, which is spot on as usual. This hearkens back to something I wrote at Jon's site a while back, in response to someone saying we should take bin Laden's claimed motives with the same degree of seriousness we'd give to Bush's:
George Bush has become the most powerful man on the planet by lying about his motivations in order to service the needs of the wealthy, and he's lived in comfort and privilege as a result. Osama bin Laden rejected a life of extraordinary wealth and privilege to live in caves, constantly on the move, at risk of dying at any time either thanks to the price on his head or from easily treatable illnesses—all in order to fight for the causes he believes in.
Whatever I might think of his tactics or ethics, I don't doubt his stated motives.
This is just one of the reasons why I've never seen any reason to doubt that bin Laden really did mean every word he said about the U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula, the treatment of Palestinians, the sanctions in Iraq, U.S. puppet governments in the Middle East, and so on. You don't toss aside a gazillionaire playboy lifestyle to pick up a gun in Afghanistan, move on to making yourself the most wanted human being on the planet, and then fill your steady stream of long, rambling manifestos with lies intended to disguise your true motivations and goals.
(Especially when your stated motive for removing U.S.-backed governments is not to give the people the right to govern themselves however they see fit, but "to make the Shariah the supreme law"—just one example where strategic deception would have gone a long way toward making the message more appealing to the presumed target audience.)
And on the equally-important flip side: if someone's pursuit of power and privilege eventually lands them the presidency of the United States, and then they continually use that office to do things that contradict the elevated rhetoric that got them there in the first place—like servicing corporate benefactors, backing coups, punishing whistleblowers, expanding government authority and impunity, and vaporizing human beings around the world—that's an unmistakable indication that their words were nothing more than sound waves propagated through the vibration of air molecules.
Such a simple lesson, so regularly ignored.
The Distant Ocean 
bin Laden wanted to exert geopolitical influence and was willing to kill thousands of civilians to do it.
Obama wants to exert geopolitical influence and is willing to kill thousands of civilians to do it.
But of course, Obama is President of the United States.
I’m told it makes a difference.
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Do you sit around questioning the motives of your enemies in a FPS? Politics is a video game where not-real-people die. Bin Laden’s motivations were irrelevant. The public that wanted war didn’t care about the motivations, and the public that didn’t want war didn’t need to know the motivations since the war didn’t concern bin Laden. The government didn’t put going after bin Laden specifically on the table. It was endless war or nothing. Bush gave up two years in because it was, in effect, an optional goal.
So for either side, meritorious or monstrous, bin Laden’s motivations were irrelevant. If you’re against war, the government isn’t willing to offer going after the criminals behind the attacks instead. If you’re for war, you’re picking some combination of racist/bigot/sociopath/selfish asshole and bin Laden’s motivations become irrelevant because you’re just going to paste your cartoon adventure fantasy all over him anyway.
Btw, bin Laden got part of what he wanted — Bush caved in to terrorists. After the attacks, the U.S. pulled troops out of Saudi Arabia.
I don’t think that bin Laden was quite as principled as John may imply, since, iirc, his manifestos were inhumane to middle-easterners whose religious sects or political positions he didn’t care for and he had no problem using non-Americans as pawns. But that he was more disciplined and more principled, even with all that evil, than his U.S. counterparts goes without saying. But that is how it must be; the most monstrous wretch that opposes an empire must develop at least some minor virtues as these are the only ways to match his enemy’s power and influence.
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Great comment, Joe.
NOoC: I don’t think that bin Laden was quite as principled as John may imply…
Not my intended implication at all; I’m just saying that I think he was being honest about his motivations and goals (said goals including killing lots of people, and convincing others to kill lots of people, in order to convince the U.S. to do what he wanted).
Btw, bin Laden got part of what he wanted…
Yeah, I always thought that was hilarious. The U.S. did in fact pull troops away from Mecca and Medina, since even the Bushies were smart enough to figure out that that was a real grievance not just of bin Laden but of many people in the Middle East. And the Iraq sanctions were ended as well–though not in the way bin Laden (or I, or anyone else who was opposed to them) wanted.
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I do sometimes speculate about the motives of my enemies in a first person shooter. I’m sure that says something about me…
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Ben — can I call you Ben? — Ben: it says you deserve better video games than what the industry provides.
But, boy howdy, is that a rant for a different site.
(Anybody remember Perfect Dark for the N64? The “bad guys” scream in fear before you, mourn for each other, and accuse you of being a terrorist.)
John: I have not, for the life of me, seen many foreign policies from the U.S. in the last decade are so that are simply stupid. Our leadership isn’t, in toto, stupid. It’s racist. It’s selfish. It’s petty. It’s thin-skinned and small-dicked and whiny. It’s small-minded and short-sighted — okay, that counts as a kind of stupid, so my comments make exception for Global Warming. Much of it (Bush and other preppies) is willfully ignorant, but not the majority, I think.
So pulling out of Saudi Arabia — hey, those are our leaders’ allies, anyway — was clever and not out of character. So, yeah, except for Global Warming — which elites probably quietly believe they can escape by dint of wealth and choice real estate selections while the world suffers — they are bright. If I missed something, do inform.
I take my cues on a lot of the Beltway, without shame, from Chomsky. To wit: his opinion of the CIA is that it’s racist and self-aggrandizing. That looks like stupid from the outside, but only because the world is so full of brown people. As soon as it’s dealing with white people (competing in institutional power struggles) domestically, poof — it’s high-class smarts all the way. You could argue it’s classist instead, given the treatment of lighter-skinned poor people in other nations, and I can agree with that: it works out about the same.
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Mx. Consequence:
You can certainly call me Ben. And I do deserve better video games then what the industry provides, at-least without doing some serious digging which I’m not inclined to do but this is a different rant indeed.
I agree that most policies aren’t stupid and they tend to satisfy agendas not publicly stated. Our foreign policy is designed to support the richest people in the world and it does that well. The structures for this are very well developed and hardened against change. It is a problem.
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Sorry for the double post:
I also agree that something that is classist is by it’s nature racist.
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I hereby promise to provide a future posting that will make video games on-topic.
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