Two fools
by David Atkins
From the personal correspondence of Osama Bin Laden:
“[Al Qaeda operatives] are not to target visits by US Vice President Biden, Secretary of Defense Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff (Chairman) Mullen, or the Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Holbrook,” bin Laden continued. “The groups will remain on the lookout for Obama or Petraeus. The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency for the remainder of the term, as it is the norm over there. Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the US into a crisis.”
One could claim that Bin Laden was strategizing intelligently from Al Qaeda’s point of view, assuming that the U.S. would be drawn into wider war in the region, therefore leading us into crisis. But I doubt it. The assassination of our vice-president would be met with almost equal fury to the assassination of our president.
No, it’s much more likely that Bin Laden’s view of American government was garnered from an infantile understanding based on media reports of Biden “gaffes,” and that the terrorist “mastermind” legitimately thought Biden would be unprepared to lead the country. So Bin Laden figured that the U.S. would somehow come crumbling down were President Biden to take over.
Stupid? Sure. But not that much different from George Bush, who figured that using a war to take out Saddam Hussein would magically solve all of Iraq’s problems, even though Bush hadn’t done enough research in the region to even know the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam.
That’s the sort of thing that happens with theocratic zealots who see violence as the best solution to international problems. Stupid, simplistic assumptions are the name of the game.
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