Bin Laden's latest message

THE LATEST pronouncement from Osama bin Laden, a videotape addressed to the American people, illustrates the importance of knowing one's enemy. It's a lesson bin Laden himself has not learned. The transcript reveals a pious megalomaniac who recycles an eclectic mix of Marxist and anarchist critiques of American capitalism and then exhorts Americans to liberate themselves from big corporations by converting to Islam.

If there is an ominous note in bin Laden's sermon, it is his assertion that all Americans bear responsibility for "massacres" committed by the Bush administration. The American people knew about these acts, bin Laden says. "Yet in spite of that, you permitted Bush to complete his first term, and stranger still, chose him for a second term, which gave him a clear mandate from you - with your full knowledge and consent - to continue to murder our people in Iraq and Afghanistan."

This is a rationale for past and future acts of terrorism against civilians. It holds all Americans guilty for whatever their government has done. "Then you claim to be innocent!" bin Laden warns. In a telling loop of self-incrimination, he adds: "This innocence of yours is like my innocence of the blood of your sons on the 11th - were I to claim such a thing."

Bin Laden's prescribed solution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - that Americans turn to Islam - may strike most Americans as a threat or as an eccentric fantasy. But that prescription does express the political aim of the radical Islamist movement in Muslim countries. "Don't be turned away from Islam by the terrible situation of the Muslims today," bin Laden counsels Americans. "For our rulers in general abandoned Islam many decades ago, but our forefathers were the leaders and pioneers of the world for many centuries, when they held firmly to Islam."

This is a concise statement of the radical Islamist doctrine. It preaches a nostalgic return to a political order founded upon enforcement of a purist version of Islamic law. It is a program for regime change in the Muslim states. Radical Islamists may represent a threat to some of those states. Bin Laden believes that he brought down the atheist Soviet Union by helping Afghans in the 1980s, and that he will cause the collapse of capitalist America now. When an American president inflates the threat from Al Qaeda to superpower status, he is merely lending credence to bin Laden's delusions.