Osama bin Laden (OBL) and his fellow travelers in al Qaeda (AQ) do not fear death, since they believe that they will go immediately to "paradise" if they are killed in their jihad with us. That is one reason why I wrote in a previous post that we should use carpet bombing in our war with AQ.
The idea is to cause AQ and OBL in particular emotional pain for their acts of war against us. Ideally, if they suffered enough pain, they would eventually surrender to us or be betrayed by their fellow Islamists. But I have also called for the US to use its ample soft power to defeat AQ.
One target of our soft power should be the twisted religious ideology of OBL and AQ. We should get as many Islamic clerics as possible to denounce OBL and AQ, and explain how OBL has mis-read their faith.
But, if it turns out that that does not work because Islam itself is on the side of OBL and AQ (Michael Scheuer's position), then we should take it upon ourselves, in this time of war, to reform Islam ourselves.
As one who does not subscribe to any organized religion, and who agrees with Christopher Hitchens that "religion poisons everything", I have no compunctions about the United States attacking OBL's faith if that is what it will take to win this war. Obviously, if that premise is false, then there is no need for us to take that drastic step. But unless and until we see a groundswell of Islamic clerics from around the world stating unequivocally that OBL and AQ are wrong in their interpretations of Islam, we shall have to assume that task ourselves.
Keep in mind that in a different era, we fought enemies much more powerful than AQ, and they subscribed to ideologies too: Nazism and the worship of the Japanese Emperor. Yet, after we had inflicted enough pain on the populations which supported our enemies, they discarded their ideologies and surrendered unconditionally to us. We should work towards the very same outcome with OBL and AQ.
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