Osama’s Fantasy World

Osama Bin Laden’s recent offer of a truce fires the imagination and prompts U.S. anti-war advocates to sit up, cross fingers and envision the moment when American troops sling arms, shake hands with their Iraqi and Afghan combatants and come home.

It sounds so simple. They quit bombing our people, and we quit bombing theirs. Hold a series of peace talks for the record, declare a victory and pull out. That is, after all, what we did to extricate ourselves from the quagmire of Vietnam.

It sounds simple, but the situation in the Middle East is different from Vietnam in one very important and exigent way. For the powerful people driving U.S. foreign policy, the end game, the prize, the brass ring is not peace. It is not even democracy in the Middle East. Simply stated, a truce with Bin Laden does nothing to advance U.S. interests. Sure, the killing might stop, but America’s geo-strategic goals would not be reached. To understand this notion more fully, take a peek into history.

The situation between Spain and the U.S. that led to the Spanish/American War in the late nineteenth century is analogous to U.S. objectives in Middle East in the twenty-first century.

In 1898, when facing the threat of war with America, Spain, then a weakened and corrupt empire, agreed to American demands to free Cuba, enact land reform, establish a representative government, etc. President McKinley, the author of the demands, had been surprised and chagrinned by Spain’s quick compliance. Beyond protecting American industrial investments in Cuba, his pro-business government had no interest in the plight of the Cuban people. What the industrial powers really wanted was Spain’s colonies in the Pacific - Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. If Spain and the U.S. agreed to terms over Cuba, the Cuban people would be free, but the U.S. would not possess Spain’s most important assets - their Pacific island "stepping stones" to China. Upon receiving notification of Spain’s acceptance of U.S. demands in Cuba, McKinley immediately asked for a declaration of war, and then backdated the declaration two days so the record would show Congress acted before he received Spain’s communication.

The similarity to today’s situation lies in the fact that the current administration wants absolute control over Middle East assets - the oil spigot - and a truce with Bin Laden would not accomplish that goal. A great many leaders on both sides of the aisle have determined that U.S. control of dwindling world oil supplies trumps every other issue and course of action. For them, everything else is uncomfortable but necessary window dressing. The War on Terror, Homeland Security, Gitmo, the Patriot Act, American war dead, Iraqi war dead, massive deficits - all mean nothing. In their view, if America does not take charge of the world’s oil supplies at this (to them) critical juncture, Russia or China will, and they are determined not to let that happen, whatever the cost.

Osama Bin Laden is aware of this sad reality, and he knows if the U.S. did not seize control of the world’s shrinking oil supplies another nation would. Certainly, he knows his offer of a truce must necessarily fall on deaf ears. As geo-strategic crunch time approaches, his alternating calls for global jihad and peace and goodwill tell me he still lives in a fantasy world.

William Schroder, the author of Cousins of Color and The Disposable Generation, lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.