Letter Writing Matters

What if you were in the room in the year 2000, with Osama bin Laden and others, strategizing a terror attack against the U.S.? What if, as a representative from a Libyan jihadist organization you counseled him *not* to attack the U.S.?

While the U.S. failure of imagination might have been that people could and would use aircraft as weapons against iconic symbols, populated with real people, of U.S. capitalism and world strength, perhaps there was an equal and opposite failure of imagination by Al Queda.

Noman Benotman appearing on Fareed Zakaria's GPS show today, is the dissident in the room. He said the feeling was the U.S. would retaliate, sure. But with cruise missles, in their anonymous drone/flyover fashion. No one ever imagined hand to hand combat in a protracted war.

While U.S. politicians on both sides continue to play the fear card, the truth is Al Queda is down to numbers smaller than "1001 Terrorists You Don't Want to Meet". Not quite down to the 52-card deck of playing cards I bought for my kids (not sure why) which had the 52 most wanted terrorists. But in the 100's.

Ten years later what would you do? Well Benotman wrote a book. Also - what he did was write a letter. An open letter - to bin Laden.

Telling him that now is the time (or even past time) to change direction. The time to fortify Islam through peaceful communications and not terrorism, which is important to Muslims worldwide. That it is the time to take a 6-month unilateral ceasefire. And to the next generation, he wants young people who might ponder life as a career terrorist to believe there are other paths.

The letter is described at: www.cnn.com/gps
The letter itself is found, in English, at: http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/images/stories/pdfs/letter-to-bin-laden.pdf
(Quilliam is an anti-extremist think tank in the UK focused on issues that affect Muslims)

Will it change bin Laden's game plan? What if it changes one mind, then one more mind, then each of them change other minds. Letter writing matters.