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10/01

As cruise missiles began stiking Afghanistan, launched by our brave troops thousands of miles away, an NPR correspondent on the Afghan border reported a most interesting observation. He said there are two streams of people crossing the Afghan border. One is the exodus of the old and infirm out of Afghanistan. The second is of young men streaming into Afghanistan in order, he reported, to fight the Western military attacks. The reporter did not dwell on this second stream, but I shall.

We know why Bin-Laden attacks the U.S. Published by several respected reporters and, more recently, in a videotaped broadcast as the cruise missiles began exploding, Bin-Laden explains those reasons as:

1. our support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine;
2. our continued bombing and embargo of Iraq; and
3. the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

What we don't know is how he expects his small network to change the most sacred cows of American foreign policy. Today's report on the inbound stream of military-age men, however, offers the first glimpse of an answer to that question. A brilliant, charismatic strategist, Bin-Laden doesn't expect his present resources to successfully engage history's most super superpower. He needs to narrow the odds, and to do so he needs the support of the American government. In a word, he needs us to do exactly what we are doing. He has provoked us. We have swallowed his bait. We have fallen into his trap.

By himself, Bin-Laden could not recruit the forces needed to confront the U.S. Only we can do that, and as the NPR reporter suggests, we may well be in the process of mobilizing Bin-Laden's forces for him. How many recruits are enlisting clandestinely in dozens of countries worldwide?

I believe the only significance of Afghanistan is the fact that Bin-Laden presently resides there. If the U.S. is successful in effecting his recruiting, Bin-Laden's network will be welcomed, officially or otherwise, in many countries, replete with the adulation of heroic proportions. Remember David and Goliath? The success of David is the only reason we remember Goliath at all.

The spectacle of the entire world arrayed against one man is only the headline aspect of the David and Goliath analogy. Another is the vulnerability of Goliath who can inflict great damage, death and destruction, but, like most bullies, can't take it. The all-too-obvious fact is that we, the American people, are extremely vulnerable to attack by relatively primitive means.

Resentment of U.S. policy runs deep throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Most of these governments are corrupt, unpopular and unstable, propped up by Western support and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, American troops. These regimes are especially vulnerable from within, and the one act best calculated to inspire Muslims to strike at their own leaders is a brutal, indiscriminate assault by the United States. I remember the months preceeding the dramatic overthrow of the American-supported Shah of Iran in 1978. The most massive armed force in the Middle East collapsed under the weight of countless numbers of unarmed Iranians who marched and died every day for 30 days against U.S.-supplied machine guns. Imagine several such Western-supported governments overthrown in favor of the Bin-Laden network. That would even his odds considerably.

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