Divide and conquer
The always informative Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (which won a Bloggie recently) is exasperated at the media's highlighting of Bin Laden's attempt to further divide America and Europe.

Marshall wonders:
"Why are we giving this al Qaida PR stunt so much credence?

Why does CNN report the news like the public is made up of a bunch of circus idiots?

And will Emmanuel Goldstein also be in on the negotiations?"

As polls and elections show, a majority of Europeans are against greater involvement by the West in the Muslim world. They want to back off. (No doubt some of the voters in Spain's recent election felt that way.) Given Europe's bloody colonial history and large Muslim population, it's understandable.

Bin Laden and al-Qaida are just playing upon that fact. My guess is that Marshall is irritated that this news highlights the fact that one of Bin Laden's goals is the same as the Democrats': a less aggressive U.S. and Western foreign policy. Let the Muslim and Arab regions be. Argue for pulling the troops out more quickly than the Republicans would (although Bush did give in to Bin Laden, with good reason in my opinion, by pulling all of the troops out of Saudi Arabia).

His frustration is demonstrated by the mention of Emmanuel Goldstein. In George Orwell's 1984, Goldstein was a fictitious saboteur employed by the state to keep the citizenry fear-stricken and thereby distracted and more accepting of repressive laws.

I doubt Marshall is being literal here - al Qaida exists of course - but his view that Bin Laden is being employed like a Goldstein is common for some (most?) of the Left. They view 911 as an aberration, a one in a million incident that is unlikely to be repeated (like, say, the assassination of JFK). After the next catastrophic attack, fairly likely given the National Security Apparatus's dysfunction, I wonder if Goldstein's name will be bandied about as much.

Democrats on the 911 Commission damn the Bush administration for not taking the pre-911 Emmanuel Goldstein threat seriously, which it in fact did not. But Democrats like Marshall then go on to argue that Republicans are playing up the threat of al-Qaida for political advantage. Republicans, they argue, were too complacent then and are too aggressive now.