Bin Laden's promoters

There's a scene in Syriana ( "Two thumbs up!" says the Vegacura and the winsom and effervescent Madame Cura) in which Prince Nasir Al-Subaai, arguing the case for his planned coup, says (paraphrasing), "The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, and 50% of the world's military spending. That would suggest their capacity for the power of persuasion is in decline."

I thought of that line this morning in reading from the latest play book the Cheney administration is using these days.

The word getting the workout from the nation's top guns these days is "caliphate" - the term for the seventh-century Islamic empire that spanned the Middle East, spread to Southwest Asia, North Africa and Spain, then ended with the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. The term can also refer to other caliphates, including the one declared by the Ottoman Turks that ended in 1924.

Specialists on Islam say the word is a mysterious and ominous one for many Americans, and that the administration knows it. "They recognize that there's a lot of resonance when they use the term 'caliphate,' " said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and now a scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, said that the word had an "almost instinctive fearful impact."

So now, Mr. Cheney and others warn, Al Qaeda's ultimate goal is the re-establishment of the caliphate, with calamitous consequences for the United States. As Mr. Cheney put it in Lake Elmo, referring to Osama bin Laden and his followers: "They talk about wanting to re-establish what you could refer to as the seventh-century caliphate" to be "governed by Sharia law, the most rigid interpretation of the Koran."

Or as Mr. Rumsfeld put it on Monday: "Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East, and which would threaten legitimate governments in Europe, Africa and Asia."

General Abizaid was dire, too. "They will try to re-establish a caliphate throughout the entire Muslim world," he told the House Armed Services Committee in September, adding that the caliphate's goals would include the destruction of Israel. "Just as we had the opportunity to learn what the Nazis were going to do, from Hitler's world in 'Mein Kampf,' " General Abizaid said, "we need to learn what these people intend to do from their own words."

A number of scholars and former government officials take strong issue with the administration's warning about a new caliphate, and compare it to the fear of communism spread during the Cold War. They say that although Al Qaeda's statements do indeed describe a caliphate as a goal, the administration is exaggerating the magnitude of the threat as it seeks to gain support for its policies in Iraq.

These people have been watching too many reruns of "The Thief of Baghdad." They conflate an insurgency made up of former Baathists (a vestige of secular pan-Arabism), ragtag foreign religious extremists, and sectarian opportunists into a "Caliphate." Or are they suggesting that Osama bin Laden, holed up somewhere in the wilds of Afghanistan/Pakistan, is poised to invade Austria?

This latest rhetoric from these clowns shows that the war they take most seriously is not the wars in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but the one right here in the ol' U.S. of A. The domestic war is the one they fear most losing (maybe because its the war in which they'll be the casualties). But in fighting it in this way -- resurrecting the old boogey man -- they run the risk of reminding people that this is the Keystone Kops who couldn't capture him, dead or alive, while at the same serving as bin Laden's and Zarqawi's most active front men and promoters in the U.S. Meanwhile, such talk -- so evocative of the "crusade" talk Bush used in the days after the Sept. 11 2001 attacks -- further elevates bin Laden's status in the Arab world and further weakens our position in the war of ideas.

In the view of John L. Esposito, an Islamic studies professor at Georgetown University, there is a difference between the ability of small bands of terrorists to commit attacks across the world and achieving global conquest.

"It is certainly correct to say that these people have a global design, but the administration ought to frame it realistically," said Mr. Esposito, the founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown. "Otherwise they can actually be playing into the hands of the Osama bin Ladens of the world because they raise this to a threat that is exponentially beyond anything that Osama bin Laden can deliver."

Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, said Al Qaeda was not leading a movement that threatened to mobilize the vast majority of Muslims. A recent poll Mr. Telhami conducted with Zogby International of 3,900 people in six countries - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon - found that only 6 percent sympathized with Al Qaeda's goal of seeking an Islamic state.

The notion that Al Qaeda could create a new caliphate, he said, is simply wrong. "There's no chance in the world that they'll succeed," he said. "It's a silly threat." (On the other hand, more than 30 percent in Mr. Telhami's poll said they sympathized with Al Qaeda, because the group stood up to America.)

Rumsfeld, Cheney, et. al. will do or say anything to win this domestic war, even if it means sacrificing our interests in the other wars in which we're currently engaged.