bin Laden

Now, what do I think about Osama bin Laden's message to us right before the elections?
Well, as I'm still pressed for time, I'll add the links later.
But generally:
bin Laden's proximate goal is not simply to kill as many Americans as possible nor does it involve turning America into an Islamic country. He may wish to do that eventually, but not right this minute.
Bin Laden's overriding goal is to clean out the Middle East of corrupt governments and to replace them with governments run by devout Wahhabis (not "Wahhabis" like the Saudi Royal Family, ones who actually live up (or down) to Wahhabi beliefs). In the process, he presumably wnats to be the new ruler of this Caliphate.
Bin Laden sees the US as an obstacle to his dream becasue we have propped up so many of the corrupt governments. His goal is, in short, to unite all of the Middle Eastern Muslim countries by pitting them against the US and to arise as the warrior who wil free them from the yoke of the "infidel imperialists."
Based on this, it is reasonable to view the purpose of 9/11 as being provocation; that is, bin Laden wanted to provoke the US into retaliating against the Middle East with the hope of uniting the warring Muslim groups against a common enemy.
To this end, he is willing to adopt whatever grievances will serve to get him followers. He personally is mostly concerned with the US presence and influence in Saudi Arabia. However, since 9/11 he has mentioned the Palestinian situation, more in my opinion to rally support from Arabs who actually care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than because it weighs heavily on his mind.

So the question is what did he hope to accomplish with the tape he sent out?
Some say he wanted to get Kerry elected, others say he pretended he wanted Kerry elected because he really wants Bush elected. I say neither. For one thing, bin Laden explicitly said that neither Kerry nor Bush could protect us. For another, the interpretation that when he talked about states threatening or not threatening him, he was saying that states that voted for Kerry would be exempt from terrorism doesn't seem to be consistent with the idea that neither Bush nor Kerry could protect us; and this interpretation was mostly advanced by MEMRI, which has strong ties to Israel and is hardly an unbiased source of information.

My feeling is that neither candidate would try to draw troops out of the Middle East,and bin Laden knows this, so he wouldn't care which one is elected (and I should point out that I don't think that bin Laden necessarily would vote for the guy who would get US troops out - keeping our troops in there is a good way to unify the Muslim world against us).
Rather, bin Laden saw an opportunity to use the US election as a way to gain support among Arabs. His shifting demands (now he is demanding that the US leave him alone) do not signal a eduction in his goals because he is getting desperate. Rather, now that we are in Iraq, a lot of Arabs feel victimized by the US. Bin Laden hopes that by playing the victim, he will become more sympathetic and the Americans less so, thus gaining him support. At the same tme, his swipes at President Bush are designed more for his Arab audience than for his American one, perhaps in anticipation of a Bush win; this way, if Bush wins, the Americans can be seen as stupid and also as evil. If Kerry were closer to winning, he might have vilified Kerry instead, in order to increase morale and rage among his fellow Arabs.

Now some people think that bin Laden was simply trying to get Kerry elected, and that it doesn't matter that threatening the US in order to get a Kerry vote would be stupid and counterproductive. Bin Laden was stupid enough to attack the World Trade Center, they argue, a terrible stratgic miscalculation based on the assumption that we would be to wimpy to attack back, so why not assume that he is ignorant enough of the US mindset to assume that he can alter the course of hte elections through threats.

Well, that assumes that what happened after September 11 was not exactly what bin Laden wanted. As I have stated above, I think that he was making a calculated move and that he won big time when we decided to invade Iraq. So he does have a good knowledge of the US mindset, so it makes sense to look at him as behaving rationally toward his goal and not making obviously stupid screwups like demaning that Americans vote a certain way because he thinks he can control our vote.

In short, bin Laden is more concerned with the Arabs than with us, and his announcements are mostly for them. Analysts who use bin Laden's tapes to win votes for one side or the other are either deluded or dishonest.