Tool Time with Victor Davis Hanson

This may surprise some folks, but I’d like to congratulate Victor Davis Hanson for stumbling upon the perfectly uncontroversial notion that Osama is bug-fuck crazy:

The truth is that bin Laden and al Qaeda want power for themselves, and use religious grievances and shifting political demands to try to achieve it.

In their worldview, Islam’s chance for a renewed united Muslim caliphate was shattered into impotent warring nations by sneaky 19th-century European colonists. They now want to reunite modern Arab nations into an Islamic empire run by the likes of bin Laden and his sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

. . . Such a single, united Wahhabi theocracy could dole out its oil to subservient importers, and use the profits to acquire enough weapons to unite the Arab world and prepare for the final war against us.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to Osama bin Laden for turning people like Hanson — who apparently can’t be troubled to sort out capability from intentions — into gibbering loons:

. . . bin Laden believes we will ultimately prove weak and suffer the Soviets’ fate. That’s why he keeps talking about breaking up our own states on the model of the now-defunct Soviet Union.

. . . So, despite bin Laden’s bragging, America remains the big stumbling block, the stronger horse. The United States alone ensures that bin Laden stays a sick man babbling in a cave — and not a Muslim caliph in flowing robes, with billions of dollars in oil under his feet and weapons merchants lined up at his palace door.

I wish this didn’t need to be pointed out — it being a mere six years into the Global War Against People Who Resemble in Some Vague Way the People Who Carried Out the 9-11 Attacks — but there is absolutely no compelling reason to take seriously the grand, utopian ravings of someone like Osama bin Laden. As an index of his enthusiasm for duplicating the 9/11 attacks, I’m sure his vlogs offer something of interest; as to whether they’re helpful in measuring his ability to actually do something with that enthusiasm, I’ll defer to someone other than Victor Davis Hanson.

The more pressing question, of course, is what Hanson and various other dolts get out of taking these delusions at face value — and what he gets out of assuming that only the US bestrides the world like a colossus, interrupting the dreams of a lunatic. I’m perfectly comfortable with the claim that American power has reduced bin Laden to “a sick man babbling in a cave.” I’m also perfectly satisfied that bin Laden is babbling in a cave in large part because the current administration decided in a fit of ADD to, you know, launch a war in Iraq that — as predicted — did a crackerjack job of bringing “al-Qaeda” (or at least people willing to adopt the franchise name) into a country where it hadn’t existed before.

But if Hanson wants to insist that “the United States alone” is keeping the Islamo-fascist-hippie-netroot-freemasons at bay, I’d suggest he stop yodeling about the “Anbar Awakening,” which — having jack shit to do with the exertions of “the United States alone” — undermines his thesis pretty convincingly.