We've called Al Qaeda many things in the last few months--a network, an organization,
a cell--but rarely what it really is: a cult. It's been obvious from the start.
But we haven't recognized it, and until we do, we can't defeat it. We've bought
the ruses Osama bin Laden's been selling us, the same masterful ones he has
used to con so many otherwise sane Muslims into service.
The twin causes Bin Laden invokes are Islam and Arab self-determination, and
armies rise to serve him. No need to convert or dogmatize. Believers are
ready-made. The Koran and Arab realpolitik do the recruiting and, best
of all, serve as smelly red herrings to throw would-be skeptical recruits and
even angry American retaliators off the scent.
Of course, Al Qaeda has no more to do with Islam than Jim Jones had to do with
Christianity. And it is no more a bona fide terrorist organization than was
Charles Manson's family. It's a charismatic psychopath's bid for immortality
via the macabre enactment of his paranoid fantasies. Nothing more. We and the
Arab world must wake up to this fact, and stop playing our scripted roles in
Bin Laden's megalomaniacal delusion. Bin Laden's grand plan to start a world
war between Islam and the West--the true goal of the Sept. 11 attacks--is
reminiscent of Manson's confessed motivation for the Tate and La Bianca murders
of 1969. By having his followers slaughter a few high-profile white bourgeois
and scrawl "pig" on the wall in blood, Manson had hoped to frame
black militants for the crimes, thereby sparking a race war.
Ditto Bin Laden. But because Bin Laden's operatives bear a resemblance to
Palestinian suicide bombers, we have labeled them terrorists and declared this
a wide-ranging global war. Never mind that suicide pacts are the stock in trade
of most cults. Remember Jonestown and Heaven's Gate? So are terroristic mass
murders, such as the Aum Supreme Truth cult's 1995 sarin gas attack in the
Tokyo subway.
Because Al Qaeda members resemble and have hidden under the umbrella of other
Islamic militants like the Taliban, we have mistaken them for Islamists. Never
mind that pseudo-religious fanaticism is integral to almost all cults. Because
Al Qaeda says it hates the United States, we mistakenly have come to believe
that it represents widespread Arab and Muslim dislike for our freedom-loving
way of life.
This hatred for the U.S. government is a quality Al Qaeda shares with American
cults such as Manson's family, David Koresh's Branch Davidians, the Montana
Freemen and loner offshoots such as Timothy McVeigh. The U.S. represents an
easy target.
Bin Laden is a classic Svengali, which is why we must terminate him or
discredit him or both. Others may inherit his fiefdom, but they are unlikely to
maintain it as effectively. His cult, like all scams, will work only so long as
we accept it on its terms.
The messianic Saudi and his outfit are the problem. Not militant Islam, not
Iraq, not the Arab "street," not even terrorism. Those are all
disguises, albeit each with its own set of troubles. For now, fighting a
focused war on Al Qaeda--not a global one against ill-defined foes--should be
the quest. The sooner we eradicate "the base," the sooner the perceived
larger threat it pretends to represent will disintegrate into its jury-rigged
component parts, and the sooner we can all return to fractious foreign policy
as usual.
Norah Vincent is a freelance journalist who lives in New York City