How Bin Laden can play the Red/Blue card

With his recent video, Bin Laden is refuting Bush's claim to be winning the war on terror. Bin Laden is demonstrating for the American people that he is in good health and has the power and ability to reach into each of our homes through our friendly television sets. He asserts, through his ability to project his image into our living rooms, that we did not win even the battle, much less the war, against him.

In addition, he implies we started this fight when we supported Israel's attack on Lebonon. And by claiming that he won't attack us again if we don't attack him again, he is shifting the blame for any further terrorist attacks onto us.

Previously Bin Laden justified his hatred of the U.S. on the grounds of our military presence in Saudi Arabia, the holy ground of Islam. But with the war on Iraq, Bush effectively shifted our military to Iraq, thus creating a non-Saudi military base in the Middle East. I don't mean to say that Bush attacked Iraq just to appease Bin Laden. The Saudis wanted us out, too. And Iraq seemed like an efficient choice for our military base because it had been weakened by both military and economic sanctions and because our previous war against Iraq, the 1991 Gulf War, is generally considered "a just war."

With the U.S. military based now in Iraq, Bin Laden is no longer able to sustain his previous anti-American justification, so Bin Laden has switched to accusing us of provoking his campaign of terrorism against us--and he attempts to make us responsible for prolonging it.

Accusing us of provoking the 9/11 attack is important to him, not only to blame us for his group's actions, but also to remind us that, with Bush's war on Iraq, we no longer can claim the moral high ground, because we have now attacked a nation that had not first attacked us or our allies.

No matter which side you are on, America has a new identity in the world because of the current war against Iraq. And that matters to each of us because America's identity is incorporated into our own self-identities. Bin Laden knows enough about the American psyche to realize that this change in "what it means to be an American" has polarized our country.