Zizek has a new book on Iraq. (thanks Sinan). I am not looking forward to his book--as interesting a thinker as he is (read the profile of him in New Yorker a few months ago)--or to his ideas on the Middle East. I am very disappointed in his visit to Israel, and his silly comments about the conflict. If you want a good book on the Iraq war, with a fine background account, and it is a book I endorsed in manuscript, it is Larry Everest's Oil, Power, and Empire. I listened to the Bin Laden's tape as aired on AlJazeera. You get the feeling that AlJazeera allows Bin Laden to fulminate, but takes out what he says on Gulf governments. I felt that the quality of the tape was better than the previous ones; much better, in fact. It sounded like he was recording it from (a place with no echoes): a room that is either very small, or was underground (could it be from Saddam's hole?). In fact, he said something about Saddam's arrest, but was quite scathing about him: he did not even mention his name, but said something to the effect that Saddam was like Gulf rulers servant and agent of the US. The view that Saddam was an "agent" of the US is quite prevalent in the Middle East, especially in Iraq. Both Bin Laden and Saddam make an effort to sound eloquent. Saddam fails miserably: he has a very annoying nasal voice, and ihe has made quite a few grammatical errors in his recent tapes before his capture. Bin Laden, on the other hand: has an excellent command of the Arabic language, but is quite demode in his usage: his frame of reference (in style and substance) is quite antiquated. He was referring to the US as "the Romans, " as in the Roman Empire. Does he need to be told that the Roman Empire had long collapsed and Gibbon wrote volumes on that? He of course calls all Christians crusaders. In fact, the framework of Bin Laden is not different from the Orientalist framework: in this very last tape, he sounded like Bernard Lewis when he said: that Islam is not a mere religion, but the whole of life covering all aspects of life, potato, potato, etc.) But Bin Laden is also vain: he reads his own words as if he is chanting some holy words. But the vanity of Bin Laden has been mentioned in a book I just read by Ahmad Zaydan (a correspondent in Pakistan for AlHayat and AlJazeera): he says that once Bin Laden made him take another picture of him because his head was not tilted nicely in the first picture. Hitler, as you know, had also an issue with vanity. He used to stand before the mirror and practice and rehearse his gesticulations: there are a few pictures by his photographer Hoffmann of Hitler before the mirror. But Bin Laden's words carry no significance in Arab public opinion. He has failed to attract any following in the region, although I will concede that form what I hear from Saudis he is quite popular among Saudi youths. And do not think that UK government is in any way less stupid than the US government when dealing with the Middle East. Today, Tony Blair warned of the "virus" of Islamic extremism. Those words play so well in Bin Laden's propaganda. In fact, some of the speech writers for Bush or Blair could also write speeches for Bin Laden.