October 13, 2001

ALLAYING FEAR MEANS LIVING A NORMAL LIFE

Osama bin Laden's rantings demonstrate that people who hide out in caves gradually lose touch with reality.

In the jittery videotape broadcast last Sunday, bin Laden boasts that America is ``full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.''

Fine words from a man who dares not show his face in public, a wanted criminal with a $5 million price on his head.

``The vanguards of Islam,'' he crowed in his unutterable ignorance, ``destroyed America.''

But America is very much still here, and in essential ways very much what it was before Sept. 11. Last Saturday evening, I sat on my balcony to listen to the concert in Sunken Gardens Park, headquarters for Denver's ``Race for the Cure'' to raise money for breast-cancer research. In Afghanistan, it was the last day of calm before the hard rain began to fall.

Sunday morning as the race began, 54,000 people flowed south along Speer Boulevard, pink ribbons tossing on a sea of white T-shirts.

Before the runners returned, President Bush had told the nation that American air strikes had begun in Afghanistan.

Desperate Afghan civilians ran for the border. The Taliban ran for the hills. So brave when they are brutalizing women, so fierce when they are massacring children, they scuttled for their burrows like rats fleeing before the shadow of an eagle.

President Bush spoke from the Treaty Room of the White House, live on television. Bin Laden's tape, made before the bombing, was dropped off, supposedly anonymously, at the Kabul offices of the Arabic-language news channel Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar.

In a briefing Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced virtually complete air supremacy over Afghanistan -- that doesn't mean someone won't get lucky with anti-aircraft fire or a shoulder-fired missile, but basically it means we fly when and where we wish, they don't. Daylight raids began Thursday, triggering further panic.

We have air-wave supremacy, too; Taliban radio went off the air the second day.

Every day, however, the Taliban have announced that bin Laden and his clerical stooge, Mullah Mohamed Omar, are still alive. That falls short of a victory paean.

Afghanistan has a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a graveyard for the imperial ambitions of great powers. It's true that the country's guerrilla fighters were able to deny the Soviet Union the peaceful occupation of the land it invaded and conquered in the 1980s, though at a fearsome cost in casualties. But they were entirely unable to dislodge the USSR's ragtag conscript army, ill-fed, ill-trained and mutinous as it was, without American support and weaponry.

Now Russia and America are on the same side. That could be a clue.

I do not deny that bin Laden is clever. Rats are clever too, which is why human beings use them in experiments. They're still vermin.

And rats can be dangerous, when they carry plague. Then it is necessary, as a matter of hygiene, to sterilize the sewers where they breed. Otherwise, we don't bother about them.

Bin Laden called for Muslims worldwide to join him in fighting America. But the Organization of the Islamic Conference, representing 56 Muslim nations, closed out its special session in Qatar Wednesday with a final communique condemning the Sept. 11 attacks on America and lamenting the deaths of Afghan civilians in American attacks. Conference members passed on the opportunity to condemn the attacks themselves.

The Taliban and bin Laden may have nominated Afghanistan to be first in jihad against infidels, but it appears there are no eager volunteers for second place. Like Shakespeare's vainglorious Glendower, he can call spirits from the vasty deep, but do they come when he does call?

Americans are apprehensive rather than panicked, cautious rather than terrified. I considered canceling a long-planned trip to Israel and the West Bank next week, but concluded that if people can get blown up in New York I might just as well go to Jerusalem. I expect to be on my way to New York when the News lands on readers' doorsteps this morning.

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