Al Qaeda as a political party

Juan Cole has a post today on the Bush administration and how a Kerry administration will differ. Nothing that will be new to most of us here but buried in the middle is a paragraph on the aspirations of al-Qaeda and the real significance of Osama bin Laden's tape last week.

Al-Qaeda has ambitions beyond just blowing a few things up, no matter how horribly. It is now a cadre organization, that is, it consists of a few thousand committed fanatics. But it wants to be a political party. That is the significance of Bin Laden's most recent videotape. He is posing as a champion of "freedom" in the Muslim world (mainly freedom from US hegemony, but he maintains also freedom from authoritarian and corrupt regimes in the region backed by the US). Bin Laden is making a play not just to be a cult leader but to succeed to the position of Gamal Abdul Nasser as an anti-imperialist icon in the region. Ultimately al-Qaeda would like to get control of entire states, and merge them into an Islamic superstate, a new caliphate. It is a crackpot idea that will fail, but many crackpot ideas that fail (e.g. the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) do a great deal of damage along the way.

We make a serious mistake if we think the "War on Terror" is simply a war against a bunch of "killers". Perhaps the real importance of having a Kerry administration is that there will be a realization that we are dealing with more than good vs evil or black vs white. We may live in a digital world but thinking digitally is very dangerous.