Intervention

Osama bin Laden has been thinking. Perhaps he has a lot of time to think in his cave, or four-star hotel, or wherever he is. And like so many who think a lot, he wants to share his thoughts. Just before the election, of course, he appeared on videotape, in golden robes, to analyze the political situation in the United States. He was discursive, almost garrulous. He explained why he hadn't attacked Sweden. He analyzed the Patriot Act. He expatiated upon the US budget deficit. Within the mass murderer, it seemed, there was a pundit struggling to get out, as if he hoped for a spot on The Capital Gang or Meet the Press.

Now he has spoken again, this time on an audiotape that runs for more than an hour. He unsurprisingly commends the guerrillas who recently attacked the US Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The tape appeared a scant ten days after the attack, in his fastest response to an event in the news. What followed, however, was unexpected. He analyzed the fall of dictators, from Ceausescu of Romania onward. And he called on the Saudi leaders to carry on nonviolent revolution of the kind the world has seen a good deal of recently. He was eager, he said, to head off an armed revolution by Saudi youth.

The interest in nonviolence, in any shape or form, is, to put it mildly, new for bin Laden. Is it possible that while reading the latest news and thinking about revolutions, he had also taken note of the highly successful nonviolent movement against the stolen election in Ukraine? After the September 11 attack, bin Laden had famously asserted that if people are asked to choose between a weak horse and a strong horse, they'll choose the strong horse. After dealing his staggering blow, he was feeling like a strong horse. But in Ukraine, where, according to European Union observers and others, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich had stolen the victory from Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition seemed to be heading for victory without violence. Its methods were the polar opposite of his. Did he hope for something like it in Saudi Arabia? He indeed appeared to have timed the release of his tape to coincide with a demonstration against the rule of the Saudi princes in Riyadh. (As it happened, attendance was low, and no nonviolent, Ukrainian-style miracle got going.)

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