Propaganda of the Deed

Summarizing the lessons drawn from Steve Coll’s recent The Bin Ladens , Fred Halliday writes (in NYRB ), “although the attacks on Manhattan and Washington in September 2001 were direct hits on American soil, Osama bin Laden’s aims do not encompass the defeat of the United States, or the conquest of the West, by, or ‘for,’ Islam: the attacks on Europe and the US are, in Arabian tribal terminology, ‘raids.’ The ‘planes operation,’ as it was originally called when it was first conceived in 1998, was designed to be a spectacular piece of theater, what anarchists used to call ‘Propaganda of the Deed,’ a provocation that would draw the US military into further, and costly, conflicts in the Middle East, primarily Afghanistan. This was also the original purpose of the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000, an operation that failed to sink the missile-carrying vessel, but that did kill seventeen American servicemen.”