The latest pronouncement from Osama bin Laden, a videotape addressed to the American people, illustrates the importance of knowing one’s enemy. It’s a lesson bin Laden himself has not learned. The transcript reveals a pious megalomaniac who recycles an eclectic mix of Marxist and anarchist critiques of American capitalism and then exhorts Americans to liberate themselves from big corporations by converting to Islam.

Bin Laden’s prescribed solution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that Americans turn to Islam — may strike most Americans as a threat or as an eccentric fantasy. But that prescription does express the political aim of the radical Islamist movement in Muslim countries. This smacks of a radical Islamist doctrine. It preaches a nostalgic return to a political order founded upon enforcement of a purist version of Islamic law. It is a programme for regime change in the Muslim states. Radical Islamists may represent a threat to some of those states. Bin Laden believes that he brought down the atheist Soviet Union by helping Afghans in the 1980s, and that he will cause the collapse of capitalist America now. When an American president inflates the threat from Al Qaeda to superpower status, he is merely lending credence to bin Laden’s delusions. — The Boston Globe