Beware the voice of authority

Expressing "moderate confidence" that the voice on a recently-surfaced audiotape is that of Osama bin Laden, US intelligence analysts believe he

has shifted from outright calls for violence to political arguments in recent taped messages in hopes of driving a wedge between the United States and its allies....

The analysts believe bin Laden is making the tactical shift to try to exploit some allies' concerns with U.S. policy in the Middle East and to attract more moderate Muslims who distrust the United States but have not embraced al-Qaida's violence, the officials said.

In that tape, bin Laden - assuming it was him speaking - called the Iraqi constitution "infidel" and said participating the in the upcoming election is apostasy. He also

praised [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi's operations and welcomed his group's joining forces with al Qaeda. ...

[He] asked "all our organization brethren to listen to him and obey him in his good deeds"

as he labeled Zarqawi "the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq."

Intelligence officials were almost effusive in their praise.

Roger Cressey, who was the deputy to former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke ... said the most recent message shows bin Laden trying to broaden his audience.

"He is trying to position himself as speaking to a global Islamic community in a way that further defines the fight against the West in his terms," Cressey said. ...

"Bin Laden gets the benefits of Zarqawi's notoriety," said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official. "He (al-Zarqawi) has got the pre-eminent insurgency in Iraq." ...

Ben Venzke, president of the private IntelCenter in Alexandria, Va., and a government consultant, said bin Laden's taped messages show "al-Qaida is very savvy when it comes to understanding public perception, its media campaign and messaging and its image."

Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New American Foundation, a Washington think tank, said ... "[t]he tapes are coming thick and fast, which means they (the terrorists) are feeling secure...."

All so authoritative. All so sure. All so confident. And, bluntly, I think all so wrong.

"If there's one thing I learned in the Army, it's always sound positive - especially when you don't know what you're talking about." - Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Thomas Waverly (Dean Jagger) in "White Christmas"

I think our "experts" here are suffering from a form of demonization (the tendency to see one's opponents as intractably evil) in which the evil opponent is invested with near-miraculous powers of intelligence, cleverness, and persuasion. Much like during our own communist witch hunts, during which we had to insure there was not a single communist teacher anywhere in the country - because we just knew that if a student was exposed to just one such teacher, it would overwhelm every other influence in their lives. Much like many now still regard gay/lesbian teachers. Much like, on our side of the aisle, some saw Moqtada al-Sadr last spring, much like some view Karl Rove. Everything the enemy does is, or at least is part of, a brilliant plot.

Bin Laden, in our experts' view, is "feeling secure." He's "very savvy," "position[ing] himself" to gain "the benefits of Zarqawi's notoriety." Except that Zarqawi is not uniting people in opposition to the occupation and the US, he's causing divisions. He may be the most notorious, but it can hardly be said he's the most effective. And in the past, he and bin Laden were, despite having overlapping ideologies, rivals. Indeed, in some ways they were ideological opponents, since until now bin Laden, while a Sunni, has never, to my knowledge, endorsed attacks against Shiites or applied words like "infidel" and "apostate" to them.

It's easy to see what Zarqawi gets out of this: a mantle of legitimacy in the eyes of some which he lacked before. But what does bin Laden get? He gives a rival that legitimacy, he ties himself to a figure even more divisive than he is, he cedes the initiative to a supposed underling, he labels a significant portion of Iraqis "infidels" - where is the "savvy positioning" in this?

Frankly, I don't buy it. I think this declaration, this new arrangement, is not a sign of bin Laden's media savvy or his sense of security. I think it's a sign of his weakness, his effective isolation, a sense that he is out of the loop, that he is in fact becoming "Osama bin Forgotten." He's not trying to keep the initiative, he's trying to regain it - and I don't mean the initiative against the US, I mean in leadership battles among violent Islamic fundamentalists.