Back to an occasional theme -- Osama bin Laden as guru to the Bush Administration. Really. We've noted before the influence of his famous weak horse/strong horse parable, and in particular the apparent melding of the parable with a related line of analysis from Bernard Lewis via Dick Cheney into the rationale for the Iraq war. Anyway, Michael Hirsh in Newsweek has more:
... the view that Arabs respond to force. Some Bush officials also liked to quote Osama bin Laden himself when he said, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like a strong horse."
For Bush and Rumsfeld, the key to a successful anti-terror policy lay in being seen as the "strong horse." As Rumsfeld said at his confirmation hearings in 2001: “We don’t want to fight wars. We want to prevent them. We want to be so powerful and so forward looking that it is clear to others that they ought not to be damaging their neighbors when it affects our interests, and they ought not to be doing things that are imposing threats and dangers to us."
The possibility that Osama might have wanted to goad the US into a display of strength that would reveal weakness never seems to have occurred to them.
UPDATE: Right on cue, the National Review's Cliff May trots out the Osama quote as an explanation of Hezbollah's surge in suppport throughout the Middle East:
Or as Osama has put it: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse."
An important aspect of what is going on here is that the Iranian mullahs are attempting to demonstrate that they deserve to lead the international jihadi movement
It would be nice if he acknowledged the role the philosophy has played in US foreign policy as well.
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