Regular Abu Aardvark readers may remember that I had my doubts about the last purported bin Laden tape. I think this one is authentic, though. For one, it actually sounds like his voice. The style is much more in keeping with his usual style (lots of bad poetry). It isn't focused on relative minutae, the way the last one was, and it has a clear strategic intent - demonstrating the leadership of al-Qaeda Central over the jihad, at a time when this is much in doubt. Finally, the release of the tape was advertised heavily on the jihadi forums over the last week - we knew this was coming, it didn't just appear with minimal fanfare. It's being enthusiastically embraced as authentic there, I've not seen any grumbling or questioning. So barring any new evidence or argument, I'm accepting this one as an authentic communication from bin Laden.
A few interesting things about the tape, other than the intervention in Jordanian politics. Obviously, bin Laden's claim that Zarqawi was under clear instructions not to target any sector of the Iraqi population and to concentrate on killing American troops is an important part of the tape. If Zarqawi was under such clear instructions, he wasn't a very good listener. But from bin Laden's perspective, it's important to say this because it allows for a clean break - to take the "good" from Zarqawi (the jihadi inspiration and so forth) while jettisoning the "bad" (the attacks on the Shia and on civilians, each of which - from bin Laden and Zawahiri's perspective - hurt the wider strategy of the jihad).
Oh, the video tape is really an audio tape with a still image of Bin Laden and a series of clips of Zarqawi. This isn't one of the tapes where you actually see bin Laden talking. That might be because of the widespread belief that Zarqawi's propaganda video contained clues about his location which allowed him to be hunted down. Or maybe this is just the best al-Sahab could do under the circumstances - who knows?
The release to the internet rather than to al-Jazeera again demonstrates this growing trend in jihadi propaganda and public diplomacy. In the past, bin Laden and Zawahiri generally preferred satellite television for their video statements, because that allowed them to reach a mass audience and to dominate the public agenda. But these days, a release to the jihadi forums gets the message out into the international media stream almost as fast as a release to al-Jazeera. They don't have to rely on al-Jazeera, or anyone else - they know that it will be picked up and widely distributed, regardless of what al-Jazeera wants to do with the tapes.
Third: bin Laden's biggest problem right now isn't the United States, it's figuring out how to get al-Qaeda's message to stand out from the cacophany of Arab politics and media today. Bin Laden and Zawahiri between them have released almost a dozen tapes in the last year or so. But even as they talk more, they have more and more difficulty dominating the public agenda. Not because they are being ignored by the Arab or international media - far from it, their tapes always get covered and make a brief splash. But rather because there's just so much else going on that their public interventions rarely gain traction anymore - they disappear into the news cycle as the next story comes along. The normalization of al-Qaeda messages diminishes their impact. So does the sheer proliferation of other stories - whether the escalating Palestinian-Israeli crisis or the Kuwaiti elections. With hundreds of competing satellite television stations, featuring everything from televangelists to Lebanese pop tart, from business news to local news, from Lebanon-centrism to Gulf-centrism to Maghreb-centrism, it's just a lot harder for any monolithic, single agenda to dominate the Arab public realm anymore. That's a point which also applies to American public diplomacy efforts - an argument which hopefully will be developed presented at greater length in another forum [relatively] soon.
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