Commentary on Osama bin Laden's famous tape of Oct 29 has conceded generally that presidential candidate George W Bush was likely to benefit more from the broadcast than John Kerry in the on-going US election. In fact, that is an almost amusing understatement.

Consider the timing. What was happening prior to the tape? Kerry was steadily gaining on Bush and it looked highly possible that the election would prove an upset, with Bush's substantial lead cut in all polls down to the wire.

The tape came juts days before the election, an October surprise par excellence. For some time, many of us had been saying and writing that al-Qaeda would intervene - probably, we thought, in the form of a terrorist attack. This would firm up support for Bush. Thankfully, we only got a tape.

Why would Osama prefer his own epitome of evil, the man whom he mocked in his broadcast, over the more nuanced democratic candidate? It is simple.

Lenin, to indicate why he wanted hard capitalists to win in European elections over more compassionate socialists, famously said "the worse the better".

In other words, a communist revolution would come faster the worse the capitalist governments of Europe and elsewhere became. Socialism might buy off the masses for a while.

Osama is very much a Leninist. He has watched Bush 'sub-contract' America's Middle East policy to Ariel Sharon, as Thomas Friedman put it. The harsh and one-sided policy America has had toward a Palestine settlement since Bush's advent has further outraged Islamic countries from Jakarta to Dakar. It is the one issue that brings all Muslims together.

Why would he want a new president much more likely to re-energise the peace process in a fair manner? America has so much to gain all over the world. Bush has made the US a pariah country in popular circles all over Asia and Africa, not just the Middle East; and neither Bush nor his harder lined vice-president Dick Cheney have expressed the slightest concern.

It's as if they actually prefer international unpopularity - and Cheney has all but confessed that. They think this sells in the swing states.

Central claim

But Osama simply ripped to pieces the central claim that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has peddled in Washington, and that Cheney and Bush have bought wholesale: that al-Qaeda didn't give a damn about the Palestine conflict, that Osama hadn't even mentioned it until this past year.

Osama's anguished statement about the American-Israeli connection and our one-sided policies, he noted, led directly to 9-11 ("the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine").

How could it be otherwise? I asked Cheney at a lecture last year about this and he was exultant:

  1. in not giving a damn about America's falling popularity throughout the world; and
  2. that our Middle East policy had nothing to do with Osama's policies and the terrorist threat.

That would be a very very difficult position to argue now. For further evidence one only has to ask any Muslim anywhere in the world - or the Thai, Filipino or Indian non-Muslim elite.

Of course no one has accused Osama of stupidity. His tape was not an idle intervention; it was pointed and aimed to re-elect 'W'.

Bush's entire campaign has been centered on the terrorist threat, hoping that this obfuscates unemployment, the catastrophe in Iraq, the tons of missing weapons there, and the very divisiveness of his presidency.

Osama would not be so stupid as to come out directly in support of either candidate; a direct endorsement of Kerry would lead millions of voters to switch to Bush; anything more ringing than the endorsement he did give Bush would backfire. So he made fun of Bush ("my pet goat" et al), knowing that this would rally Americans to their president.

But most importantly, Osama reinforced the central tenet of the Bush campaign: that the pre-eminent problem (in the campaign) is terrorism. By cynically talking about how Bush gave al- Qaeda more minutes to complete their attack (ridiculous, of course) he revealed just how ghastly is his moral compass: the worse the better.

Those who thought that Cheney would contrive a terrorist threat - or even a terrorist attack - (and there are ever so many analysts who see him nefarious enough) didn't have enough faith in Osama. He took matters in his own hands.

We can never know if his tape will be the critical element in re-electing the president; what we know is that before the tape Bush was sinking. Five days later Bush won - on his central tenet, that the war on terrorism was where is was at.

W SCOTT THOMPSON, an adjunct professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Boston, is a former assistant secretary of state for the Ronald Reagan administration. He also served as Donald Rumsfeld's assistant at the Pentagon in 1975-76. He lives in Bali and Washington DC.