Open Letter to Osama Bin Laden: Be Careful What You Ask ForYou Just Might Get It

I was reading this article on blooming democracy in the middle east and kafiyah from a usually skeptical Arab writer.

Key quotes:

So one is left to wonder if this moment will last more than a moment, whether it will turn into a repeat of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or whether it will be a reprise of the truncated Beijing Spring. The region lacks China's economic dynamism, but it also lacks a Gorbachev and his policy of perestroika.

For now, all the Middle East has are demonstrators and brave voters who, ballot by imperfect ballot, e-mail by e-mail are burying a culture of fear. And for the moment, that may be enough.

Make sure you read the entire article because there is much more to it talking about the different reform movements going on in different countries in the middle east. Like the Kuwaiti Women's Suffrage movement.

After I read this article, I thought about the last four years and how it all started. It wasn't the Iraq war nor the subsequent Iraq elections that really started this ball moving.

It was a cloudless day in September. September 11, 2001.

I was skipping through the internet when I saw a quote from Talleyrand, a minister in Napolean's French government:

This is worse than a crime; it's a blunder

Then I read this article and that quote started echoing in my mind.

Osama Bin Laden may have committed the biggest blunder, politically and militarily, in history. The "master mind" of September 11 wasn't such a master mind at all. The more I think about it, the more I realize that he may be a battlefield strategist, but when it comes to the entire war, he is more like Hitler. So sure that his egomaniacal ideologies would carry him to victory that he did not really see the greater picture. He was so entrenched and drenched in his Islamic Jihad ideology and believed so strongly that the people of the middle east, Muslims everywhere wanted what he wanted, a Muslim world dominated by strict Islamic ideologies, that he did not pay attention, did not even ask what the rest of the people wanted.

He assumed that, because so many disaffected and disenfranchised young men had come to join him in Afghanistan that this was a representation of what the Arab/Islamic world wanted.

Obviously, Osama spent too much time in the mountains of Afghanistan and was completely out of touch.

Osama, a message from me to you, it's an old cliche that must not be popular in your part of the world: When you "assume", you make and "ass" out of "u" and "me".

Well, you, at least, Osama. You made an ass out of yourself.

I have read his every word, watched his video statements, read Zawahiri. In many of their statements they talk about the "freedom" of the Arab/Islamic people from the "oppression of the west and corrupt governments". He started using those statements right after the President started talking about it in relations to Afghanistan. Then the word "freedom" made its way into more of their speeches after we talked about the "liberation" of Iraq.

Another old cliche seems appropriate: Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

You see, Osama was using the word "freedom" and he didn't really know what it meant. His "freedom" was the prison of another wasted, fascist, totalitarian ideology. He just wanted to replace the version his "people" were living under with his own.

Now, he is getting it. The Arab/Islamic world is experiencing freedom like it has never experienced it before. The failed ideology of totalitarian fascist regimes are getting squeezed every day. They are falling outright or crumbling little by little from the inside. People are not afraid to say the word "freedom" anymore in public. And, they understand, for the most part, what it means.

Osama bin Laden thought he knew something about America and the people of the world. He thought he understood freedom. He thought wrong. He should have read more history. He should have read Franklin Roosevelt's speech to congress in 1941 regarding the four freedoms.

I decided to write Osama a letter, explaining his failures.

An Open Letter to Osama bin Laden:

When you started talking about "freedom" you should have first made sure you understood what the four true freedoms were.

Freedom of expression: Osama, your ideology fails to meet this condition. Your idea of freedom of expression is that the imams or your followers who urge Jihad and teach in the path of Islam that only you favor have the freedom to express their ideas. You failed to understand that this is a universal freedom for all humans and not just the select few that you see as worthy. You failed to understand that people are capable of thinking for themselves, that people want to be able to say what they think and feel, without restrictions. The lack of this freedom does not refine the human mind nor spirit, but, instead, causes stagnation and despair. You failed to understand that despair and stagnation are not the normal state of the human mind and it will rebel against it.

Osama, you failed.

Freedom to Worship God (or not) in our own way: Osama, your ideology failed because you wanted to decide what was the right way, the only way, to worship God. You killed people who did not worship Him in your way. You mutilated them, tortured them and imprisoned them. You and your cronies like Zarqawi and Zawahiri. You failed to understand that the Creator is greater than any one ideology can contain. You failed to understand that compulsion to worship does not create love of the Creator, but fear and loathing. Your ideology is not only rejected by Christians, Jews, Hindu, Buddhist, etc, your ideology is rejected by the very and varied sects of Islam. Your ego was writing checks your body couldn't cash. Your ego blinded you to the reality of even your own people and religion.

Osama, you failed.

The Freedom From Want: Osama, your ideology failed because you wanted to decide who could have and who could not. You failed to understand the basics of economy and that is that it takes the entire society, the entire culture, men and women alike to insure that society works and all of its members are cared for, are free from want and are free to live peaceful lives. Your ideology would put women behind a veil for eternity, make them dependent on men and man's benevolence which has always been suspect, even between themselves. Your ideology would enslave men and women, not free them to create, to think, to grow in ways that would help their fellow humans be free from want. Instead, you would have forced them to scrounge in the dirt for a meager existance. You failed to understand that the things your ideology rejects, such as technology that frees men's minds to create things to better man kind, like vaccines and surgical procedures that saves lives, advanced farming implements to grow more food to feed the hungry, internet and other communication tools to link humans from every walk of life and every ideology, who, together create the works that will see men into the future, see man free from want.

Osama, you failed.

Freedom From Fear: Here, Osama, may be you biggest failure of all. Your ideology can only exist when people must fear the boot of your kind of oppression. Your ideology thrives on the fear that you would instill on whole nations and people. You wanted to instill fear, like every fascist dictator before you; the fear of not worshipping as you demanded; the fear of not speaking as you demanded; the fear of not dressing as you demanded, the fear of not being as you demanded. You thrive on fear and it is fear that people most want freedom from. You failed to recognize that people already lived in fear and they did not and do not want to continue to live under those conditions. They are rejecting it and, therefore, your ideology must be rejected, too. Freedom from fear is not the replacement of one type of fearful ideology with another. This last freedom, among all the others, is the true freedom that allows mankind to grow and to implement the other four freedoms.

Osama, you failed.

In all of history, there was only one ideology that ever gave man the capacity to enjoy these four freedoms to their fullest and that was and always will be, democracy; the ideology that directly opposes your own.

I wonder how you feel today? Are you seeing what you have wrought with your failures? You have created the very instrument of your downfall. In your zest to destroy or render helpless and dark the beacon of true freedom in the world, you made the light from the shining city on the hill shine more brightly than it has in years. It now shines so brightly that the beacon of freedom has started a fire in the minds of the very men and women you sought to oppress with your fearful ideology.

It is the fire of freedom.

Can you feel the flames licking at your heels as you run from place to place?

You should be afraid, Osama bin Laden, you and your kind should be very afraid because you cannot exist in a world that is free. Someday, you will be nothing but a pile of ashes, burned down on the pyre of your ideology by the flames of freedom. You will not be remembered as the savior of Islam, the Mahdi. You did not take your Qu'ranic studies seriously or you would have remembered that the savior of Islam, the Mahdi did not stand alone. At his side was Issa, Jesus, the Christian prophet and savior. You did not remember that Mohammed warned against the false prophets that would come after him. You did not remember that false prophets were the destroyers that would harm Islam.

You are the false prophet. You are the destroyer. You are a failure.

You will not have monuments built in your name nor poetry or epics written about your exploits and how they saved the Islamic world. Instead, you will be remembered like all those destroyers before you: evil and hated.

You sent 19 men to kill 3000 and widow and orphan thousands more. You called those 19 men martyrs. In reality, you created 3000 martyrs for the new struggle for freedom; the first true martyrs of this struggle and it is these martyrs who will have a monument built to them, whose stories will be told in breathless wonder at their bravery and self-sacrifice.

On the very ground where you spilled their blood, a tower, the highest tower in the land of the United States, the Freedom Tower will stand 1776 feet tall reflecting the date of American Independence and the beginning of the democracy that was pre-ordained to be your downfall. It will be their monument, a monument to freedom and it will be completed by 2009. It will be their names inscribed in granite and reflected in art and through history. At it's base is a cornerstone that reads:

"To honor and remember those who lost their lives on September 11th, 2001 and as a tribute to the enduring spirit of freedom -- July Fourth 2004."

You, Osama, will be remembered, but not in the way you had planned.

You thought you could see into the future, a future with strict Wahabist Islam as the guiding post of the Arab world. A future where your version of Islam and the greater Middle East ruled the world and Muslims from all walks of life would come to live there and visit there.

But, I can see the real future. It is a future where a tower stands, taller than any ever built. It will be a beacon of freedom. To this tower will come, once again, people from all countries and all walks of life and religions. The Muslim world will see it, not as you wanted it to be seen as the source of their oppression, but as a monument to their freedom.

I also know that, like all the destroyers who came before you, your ego, your ideology, cannot let you see that you are a failure and that your nightmarish dreams of a world dominated by a fascist Islamic state will never come true. Instead, you will sit in your little room, hiding from the world, like Hitler in his bunker, planning your "final" destruction. The destruction that all such egomaniacal ideologues think they must inflict on the world because, if they cannot exist then neither can the world as they know it.

You should learn, Osama, that the world is much more than you and it will go on, long after you are gone and your name appears once in a paragraph in a history book that goes on for pages and chapters about the revolution of freedom that came next.

You may attack us again. You may continue to send money to killers and torturers. You may kill thousands. But you cannot kill the thing that you must fear most: freedom.

You should have been careful what you asked for because now you are getting it.

Freedom and Democracy.

Sincerely,
Kat
The Army of Pajama Clad Bloggers of Freedom
United States of America

You can't always get what you want, but you get what you need.