Osama bin Luthor?

Simply a whimsy. Should Osama bin Laden be considered George W. Bush's Lex Luthor? Lex, as fans of Jerry Siegel will recall, was Superman's nemesis in the old DC Comics, a guy who once had noble aspirations, as a young mad scientist in Smallville, but then went off the rails when Superboy accidentally blew up one of his inventions, rendering Lex prematurely and permanently bald and earning Superman the life-long enmity of Luthor, who became an arch-villain dedicated to destroying Superman by any means necessary. Lex's bitterness led him to increasingly complicated and bizarre strategems for killing the Man of Steeel, including synthesizing Kryptonite and devising his own battle-suit (purple and green) which gave him some, but not enough, superpowers of his own. An over-reaction, to be sure; why not simply a toupee or allographic transplant (I realize Lex had no side hair to work with). Superboy's mistake was understandable, after all, and the Boy of Steel lacked Lex's intellectual brilliance. As Jerry Seinfeld, noted Superman fan once joked, Siegel actually portrayed Superman as kind of a yutz, despite his Kryptonite parents with the Hebrew names. It's why, to the everlasting shame of Jor-El and Lara, Kal-El went into physical work and never became the brain surgeon they hoped.

But I stray from the point, perhaps because there are an amazing number of websites devoted to Superman trivia. Osama as George W. Bush's nemesis, along Luthor/Superman lines, is something of a stretch for a number of reasons. Osama perhaps fits the bill better than Bush, although W is unquestionably something of a yutz himself. But the rivalry just seems a little one-sided, when you think about it. As those swimming in adjacent lanes here on the Pond know, I am not one of those haughty Bush-is-dumb critics. I hold firmly to the view that Bush is somewhat better than a mediocrity, and I will defend Bush's intellectual prowess with all the vehemence that such a tepid view commands. I will murmur from the rooftops, in other words, that Bush is a little better than so-so when it comes to thinking and analysis. In the pantheon of super heroes, Bush proudly takes his place as MediocreMan. Take that! you needling Leftist pundits!

But, in all intellectual honesty -- is MediocreMan as clever as Lex Osama? Bush has the Pentagon to support his side, a vast array of power rivaling even the Man of Steel's armamentarium. Surely the U.S. military has things faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. OBL has a camel and a laptop, which he can't use for anything other than video games or we'll pinpoint his location. Certainly, then, we have asymmetrical warfare on our hands.

To make it a fight, Osama has used manipulation. He can't fight the hated, decadent West by direct military means, or he'll be wiped out in an instant. His strategy, therefore, has been to provoke the United States into self-destructive acts of retribution, counting on the knee-jerk, play-to-the-uneducated-masses style of America's prep-school cowboy, MediocreMan himself. Bin Laden arranged for the assassination of Ahmed Massoud, the Afghan anti-Taliban leader, on September 9, 2001, using Qaeda soldiers posing as journalists. No doubt it was OBL who orchestrated the $5 billion buy-up of U.S. Treasuries (long positions) and simultaneous short-sale of airline, insurance, and tourism stocks in the weeks before 9-11. The SEC investigated, but of course its findings were either inconclusive, embarrassing or classified immediately because they were inconclusive except to the extent they were embarrassing. As with all such interesting and important questions in recent American history, such as who it was that dumped anthrax all over the American landscape in 2001, the inquiries sank beneath the relentless tide of ensuing disasters and were never heard from again.

I don't know if Luthor bin Laden could have foreseen events all the way forward to July 2006. I'm a chess player and appreciate the difficulties of imagining changing positions in a fluid environment, that is, where you must envision the results of your opponent's possible moves, your response, his possible responses, etc. 'Tis said the greatest chess players are able to imagine the board, seeing it steady and seeing it whole, perhaps 3 or 4 moves in the future. If you think that's easy, you haven't played much chess. Clearly Osama Lex saw the Afghan invasion coming, and did what he could to slow the inevitable American victory. I doubt that he was ever in Tora Bora, or spent any time in Pakistan, where Mastermind Khallid Sheikh Mohammed was captured. I think OBL simply floated rumors to that effect so the Democrats could harp endlessly about MediocreMan's failure to "capture or kill bin Laden at Tora Bora." I think Lex has always been in Iran, where he can count on consistent anti-American feeling and a more or less stable regime.

I think OBL saw the Iraqi invasion coming, and could probably foresee that 9-11 would be used as a generalized motivating principle by Bush to invade an Arab country. The handwriting for that one was on the wall, and not just in an Afghan cave. The PNAC crowd of neo-conservatives had been beating the drum for years. Of course, invading Iraq was a completely irrational response to terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., but taking stock of your arch-enemy's irrational tendencies is part of good strategic thinking. I think that bin Lexen also knew that MediocreMan's analysis of the post-invasion aftermath would be "facile," and not in the sense Bush intended in his solecism yesterday at the Maliki press conference, where he argued for a "flexible and facile" approach to curbing violence in Baghdad, demonstrating the dangers inherent in a new-word-a-day program when practiced by a verbally inept leader (Bush's verbal SAT actually was about 150 points too low for admission to Yale, so in this sense he is LessThanMediocreMan).

Bush's homely, touching vision of Iraqis as just like people everywhere is, of course, a noble ideal, but it appears that media accounts that Bush did not know about the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish sects until the invasion was underway may have been right on the money. The Cowboy divided the Iraqi population into only two groups, (1) the aspiring democrats, and (2) the killers who hate freedom. This oversimplification has proved an intractable flaw in his analysis. Lex bin L., an ideological and religious foe of Hussein, probably had a good sense of what would happen when the artificial cohesion of Saddam's tyrannical rule was loosened; namely, exactly what we're seeing today, where the Iraqis are waging civil war and killing each other in carload lots, along with smaller numbers of American soldiers and international journalists. Osama knew about sectarian rivalries in the House of Islam, not always a perfect Dar es Salaam.

Could Lexama have seen all the way to the ascendancy of a Shiite government pulled gravitationally toward Shiite Iran, the strengthening of Hezbollah by its ties to Iran, the alawi Shia in Syria, and the new Shia government in Iraq, and the ensuing difficulites with Israel and the cascading difficulties for the United States in attempting to cope with a disintegrating Middle East? All as the result of 9-11 and of a hamfisted, unlettered response to a terrorist attack by a President in way over his mediocre head? Is this why bin Luthor would have timed his 2004 video to aid the Cowboy of Steel in his neck-and-neck struggle with another yutz, John Kerry?

If all that's true, bin Laden is a helluva chess player, and probably clever beyond the imagination of even Jerry Siegel. I think our modern day Lex has been pleasantly surprised by the fortuitous cooperation he has received from MediocreMan. To bring the world close to a Clash of Civilizations 5 years after hijacking 4 American airliners and committing what was, at bottom, simply a stateless, criminal act, exceeded even the arch-villain's fondest, perfervid fantasies. It is as if all bin Laden did was to pull the plunger on a pinball machine. The ensuing lights, bells, crashes, caroms and mounting death toll -- someone else did all that for him.