Bin Laden's embarassing ommision

TigerHawk:

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Apart from the list's comic aspects, it is fascinating for its omissions. Why didn't bin Laden talk about Iraq?

Less than 2 1/2 years ago, al Qaeda broke the news to the Taliban that it was diverting resources to Iraq so as to humiliate the American "Crusaders."

All this was on the orders of bin Laden himself, the sources said. Why? Because the terror chieftain and his top lieutenants see a great opportunity for killing Americans and their allies in Iraq and neighboring countries such as Turkey, according to Taliban sources who complain that their own movement will suffer... Bin Laden believes that Iraq is becoming the perfect battlefield to fight the “American crusaders” and that the Iraqi insurgency has been “100 percent successful so far,” according to a Taliban participant at the mid-November meeting who goes by the nom de guerre Sharafullah.

Al Qaeda drew a line in the sands of the Sunni Triangle, and the United States Army and Marines walked right across it. First, al Qaeda tried to kill Americans, per bin Laden's orders. It largely failed. Then al Qaeda went after America's allies, and succeeded only in turning public opinion against itself in every Muslim country it attacked. After thirty months of battlefield defeats and political embarrassments, bin Laden won't even mention Iraq in one of his rare public utterances, and he rallies his troops to fight a war where American soldiers aren't. How humiliating. How delightful.

Al Qaeda has lost in Iraq, and bin Laden is desperate to change the subject. He and his organization are at grave risk of being discredited, and when that happens it will be much harder for al Qaeda to attract recruits, raise money, or deal with governments.

I am not sure. We know that bin Laden is a big CNN fan. Based on their reports he may think he as already won in Iraq. The issues he hit on are the ones were the west has recently shown a little spunk if not much backbone. There is also not much in the speech for Iran and its nukes. Perhaps he is afraid to say something either way about the country that supposedly holds his son. Maybe he does not want to give US hawks another reason to go after Iran by saying he is on Iran's side.

Update: The Belmont Club notes:

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You don't have to fully agree with Tigerhawk's assessment to acknowledge there is some truth to it. One can argue about the extent to which the enemy is hurting but it is difficult to maintain that the enemy is unhurt. But if Tigerhawk was surprised by the omission of Iraq, I was doubly surprised by the inclusion of the Danish cartoons in Osama's list of vital fronts. The Danish cartoon battle has been largely fought by the blogosphere and a handful of European newspapers; that is to say fought by the no-account, podunk, non-Pulitzer Prize winners of the world. The decision by the great flagships of modern Western thought -- the newspapers, networks and towers of academia -- to stay out of it has inadvertently but fortunately eliminated them from the reckoning. Their self-exclusion means that a bunch of guys with computers on TV carts, kitchens, basements, attics and in the garages have actually left a mark on Osama Bin Laden....

Oh, he is hurting in Iraq. See this post on the effect of attrition in Iraq as well as a look at overall progress.