Validated by Bush

Bernard Lewis asks in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd; alt. free link) Was Osama Right? It's his standard weak horse/strong horse argument, so beloved of Dick Cheney --

We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility.

From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks -- on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000 -- all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

He goes on --

Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two -- to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then.

Note the implication that Stage 1 was completed before 9/11. It wasn't. As Lewis surely knows, Bin Laden's references to removing infidels from "the lands of Islam" referred to the historic home of Islam in Saudi Arabia. And the US did indeed withdraw from Saudi Arabia -- in 2003, a deal worked out by Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, serving of course under President George W. Bush.

So Osama may not have been right, but he couldn't have been luckier in his choice of enemy.

UPDATE: One other bothersome thing about the Lewis article. If the Russians had such a great thing going in deterring Islamic terrorism by a reputation for a fearsome response, what went wrong? Well, they invaded an Islamic country far away from home and got bogged down in an extended insurgency ...[as even Christopher Hitchens says -- "the true and original source of many of our woes in the Islamic world"]

[previous post discussing the Lewis thesis that the Muslim world uses terrorism and migration as weapons against the West; and the last point above is made quite eloquently here]