After the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden told an Al Jazeera interviewer that "the values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights and humanity have been destroyed.... I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed."
The attacks on New York and Washington four years ago were unimportant in their own right, Bin Laden was saying. Most important was the course of action he hoped they initiated: The West would destroy its own freedoms.
In taking on Al Qaeda, do we risk altering our basic character, as Bin Laden predicted?
The terror mastermind's statement has been widely understood as a description of asymmetric warfare -- a situation in which a military handicap is converted into an advantage. Al Qaeda's lack of an organized fighting force is a strength because it possesses neither territory nor a headquarters that the U.S. military can target. Unable to militarily attack or defend itself against the terror network's dispersed resources, the United States is forced to protect itself by curtailing its freedoms in the name of national security, creating a paradox: A freedom defended is a freedom diminished. It is a form of suicide that mirrors the jihad's suicidal techniques.
But even this understanding views Al Qaeda's actions in terms of old-fashioned military strategy, in which disabling the state is of paramount importance. Precisely the opposite is true. Al Qaeda is not simply out to disable the U.S. It also seeks to destroy the democratic freedoms by which the West defines itself. For Bin Laden, these freedoms are based on the un-freedom of Muslims, whose natural resources, principally oil, the U.S. must secure to guarantee its prosperity and power. Destroying the identity of the West -- its democratic freedoms -- would expose its hollow and hypocritical nature. Paradoxically, for this to happen, the U.S. needs to become, in the short term, more rather than less powerful. That way it can extinguish its liberties more effectively.
Bin Laden's belief that the damage Al Qaeda inflicted on 9/11 was minor compared with what the U.S. would impose on itself illustrates the speculative role he envisions for his network. The attacks were simply an initial investment in terror. If Al Qaeda can neither control nor direct the global consequences of its actions, it engages in little more than gestures of risk. But its actions also are gestures of duty, nowhere more so than in suicide bombings, in which the possibility of militants gaining anything by their acts is spectacularly destroyed. One of the purposes of "martyrdom" operations is to demonstrate the otherworldly nature of the jihad.
