Osama as Gavrilo Princip

I might as well post this too. I wrote this in February, but it is still interesting, if probably completely wrong. Let me know what you think...

In 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, setting off the powder keg of ethnic conflict that was Eastern Europe. While I don't mean to suggest that bin Laden was directly responsible for the Iraq invasion (any more, really, than Gavrilo Princip was responsible for German trenches in France), I think we can tag him as the man who set off the powder keg of ethnic conflict that is the Middle East today. I'm not trying to place blame here. My point is this: bin Laden is a flash in the pan. The real threat, and the real story for the history books, is going to be the (World?) war kindled by the collapse of nation states and the dissolution of American influence in the Mid East. International terrorism is not the problem for the U.S. We should be much more concerned about an old-fashioned conventional war fought throughout the entire oil-producing, militant, ethnically diverse region. And there's no way for us to avoid it--they way we avoid, say, Darfur--now that we've set it off. We would be caught in the middle, as our troops are already there. And we have real interests, like the survival of Israel and access to Saudi oil.
I think we have little more to fear from bin Laden. But that is not to say he failed. Like Princip, he was hoping to bring down an Empire by striking a match. He doesn't want to destroy New York; he wanted to get the U.S. involved in a war we can't win and thereby drive us out of the region. We should, I think, forget about terrorism and start figuring out how to fight and win a real war in the Mid East. But first we have to figure out what winning would really mean. Democracy in Iraq is a daydream. Stability must be the goal.

In fact, the only circumstance in which we might be again in danger of being attacked is if we pull out of Iraq now. Bin Laden's strategy was to bleed the giant. He watched us go into Somalia with big guns, run into trouble, and eventually leave without having stabilized the country or achieved any of our objectives. It took some time, but the vacuum we left was eventually filled by a fundamentalist Islamic government. (A government which has recently been ousted by Ethiopian troops--on our suggestion. This could be a much more effective way for us to fight wars in the future...) If we leave Iraq now, we will have followed his game plan almost to the letter. Look for another attack in the U.S. almost as soon as our troops are safely home, in order to provoke us to come out again. We are vulnerable out in the open--not so much our soldiers, who are well trained, or our military, which is improving daily, but our political clout in the region and around the world.

So, my point is either we get mixed up in a war now--and bin Laden and co. are out of the picture--or we go home and risk a second major attack. Either way, the idea that we must be involved in a global war on terror, with Osama as the mastermind adversary, is not at all helpful.