Bin Ladin

6 Pages 1409 Words

Osama bin Laden is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of the Islamic fundamentalist revolution. The revolution itself is real enough, fuelled by religious puritanism, hostility to Israel and America, cultural changes and social deprivation. It is as real as the English Puritan revolutions of the 17th century, as the American Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Nazi Revolution or the Chinese Revolution. Like them it portends war. But bin Laden is not a great revolutionary leader. He is not to be compared with Cromwell, Washington, William of Orange, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler or Mao.
He is much closer to the immature charismatics who have come to the surface in many revolutionary situations, danced for the moment on the flood of events, and then been submerged by them. He is a Robespierre or lesser Trotsky, perhaps only a Duke of Monmouth. He is one of those of whom Lenin was thinking when he wrote of “left-wing deviationism — an infantile disorder”. For all his personal austerity, and his merciless use of terror, he belongs to the category of playboy revolutionary, a rich man’s spoilt son petulantly seeking the approval of his deceased papa.

The distinction between serious revolutionary leaders and these mayflies of the revolutionary process is that the great leaders have a strategic analysis of the real forces and develop an effective strategy for dealing with them. Of the seven great revolutionary leaders, six had such a grasp of reality that they died in their beds, even if Napoleon’s bed was on St Helena. Only Hitler, who lost touch with reality after 1940, had to commit suicide. Monmouth died on the scaffold, Robespierre on his own guillotine and Trotsky with Stalin’s ice pick in his head. Someone is going to kill Osama bin Laden; he will almost welcome it, because that is the only end that fits the drama he has scripted for himself.

Tactically, last week may have seemed a goo...