DID BIN LADEN, AL-QAIDA ACT TO FURTHER FANTASY IDEOLOGY?

Saturday, September 7, 2002

When Osama bin Laden was still dropping off videotapes at the offices of Al-Jazeera, watching them was like entering a dark fantasy land. The world as he perceived it was so different from the world his American listeners live in as to be incomprehensible.

Lee Harris explores this idea in an article, ``Al-Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology,'' in the August-September issue of Policy Review. A fantasy ideology, in this description, is the use of political and ideological symbols ``not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy.''

To someone under the spell of such a fantasy, other people are merely props, not actors in their own right, and neither their opinions nor their welfare is of the slightest concern.

As historical examples, Harris cites the collective fantasy of fascism as experienced in Germany and Italy. To Mussolini, Italy under his leadership was destined to reclaim the vanished glories of the Roman Empire, and so off he went to conquer Ethiopia -- not because of anything the Ethiopians did or said to provoke him, but because an imperial power has to conquer something.

In its own terms, it makes a certain grisly kind of sense, a sense I could extend to the Columbine killings.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 13 people and themselves at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, shared a dark fantasy, preserved in the videos they made. How could they have done what they did? In the reality they had constructed for themselves, nobody else really existed -- with one intriguing exception.

Brooks Brown had had an on-again, off-again friendship with Harris, and the two met at the school shortly before the shooting started.

``I like you, Brooks,'' (Eric) Harris said to Brown. ``Get out of here.'' For that instant, Brown emerged from the painted backdrop of the fantasy as a real person whose existence mattered even to someone who was about to become a mass murderer.

People are most readily drawn to fantasy ideologies if the reality they occupy along with the rest of us is highly unsatisfactory to them. As we know from the bin Laden tapes, he is still obsessing about a centuries-long decline in Islam's power and influence in Europe, and the loss of the Ottoman Empire.

So we can reasonably ask what is it about the circumstances of certain people that makes them vulnerable to a particular fantasy, or how it is maintained. But asking why they do what they do, whether it is marching off to Ethiopia or flying planes into the World Trade Center, or what they are trying to accomplish, might be very misleading.

Lee Harris contrasts attacks like these, driven by the demands of a fantasy ideology, with the ``why'' of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

It's true that the Japanese miscalculated what the American response would be, and the eventual consequences to themselves, but their aims were rooted in reality. They struck at Pearl Harbor not because it was a symbol of American pride and power, but in order to remove the American Pacific Fleet as a factor in their plans for conquest in Asia.

War, as Clausewitz observed, is the continuation of politics by other means, that is, to get other people to do what we want them to do. And most analyses of Sept. 11 assume, Harris says, that the attacks were similarly an effort to get us to do what al-Qaida wants us to do. But what if the attacks were intended only to prove, to itself and to the Arab world, that its fantasy was the true reality?

``To be a prop in someone else's fantasy is not a pleasant experience, especially when this someone else is trying to kill you,'' Harris writes, and that is the position Americans have been placed in by the fantasy ideology of radical Islam. The twin towers were targeted because they were the symbols of American power, not because their loss would strike a mortal blow.

Harris' model explains why al-Qaida didn't follow up its initial success with a flurry of smaller attacks to amplify the effects of the first one. Harris notes that the consequences of the anthrax-laced letters suggest that a string of such events, small in themselves, would have been devastating to the cohesion of American society. But they would have been anticlimactic in the fantasy scenario.

Like any theory, this one can be pushed too far. But it richly deserves attention.