Is Osama Pea-Green?

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times.com

WASHINGTON
For almost a year, he'd gone dark.

Then he pops back up trash-talking our vice president, saying Dick Cheney
has killed more people in Baghdad than Hulagu of the Mongols, whoever that
guy is; mixing up Rummy, with his slicked-back hair and wire-rimmed glasses,
with Robert McNamara as "the butcher of Vietnam," and raining imprecations
on "White House gangsters."

"It is time that we get even," Osama bin Laden said on the tape delivered to
an Al Jazeera reporter in Islamabad. (Can't we assign a C.I.A. drone to
every Al Jazeera hack?)

It was the usual rancid rant cloaked as sacred chant.
The real question was: Why would the boss of Al Qaeda want to reveal he's
still alive when he could plot and scheme in ghostly obscurity while his
landlord, General Musharraf, assures us he's dead?

Well, it's obvious, isn't it?
Osama's jealous. He will not be ignored. He doesn't like playing second
fiddle. Another anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-American, megalomaniacal,
sociopathic mass murderer is getting all the attention.

The butcher of Liberty Plaza has come down with a bad case of Saddam envy.
When President Bush realized he couldn't catch Osama quickly, he was
downgraded faster than a telecom stock. Osama went from Wanted Dead or Alive
to Forgotten but Not Gone. Mr. Bush promoted Saddam to Arab Evildoer No. 1,
and had not even mentioned Osama's name for the last four months.
The more Saddam thumbed his nose at the U.S., the more popular he became
among the Arab malcontents who idolized Osama.

You can imagine Osama sulking in his tent on the Pakistan-Afghan frontier or
his hovel hidden in the vast slums of Karachi, drinking tea and wondering if
he's chopped liver, catching CNN on satellite, muttering that the only
American who's making a stink about catching him is Tom Daschle, whoever
that guy is.

It must rankle bin Laden to see Mr. Bush striding the globe as Top Gun, a
suddenly unstoppable cowboy who soared in the midterm elections by
threatening the evildoer his father easily defeated and eclipsing the
evildoer who transformed his presidency.

In an interview Monday with Radio Free Europe, Mr. Bush was still trying to
depersonalize Osama, making him a face in the terrorist crowd: "Whether it's
him or somebody else, they're plotting an attack. . . . This issue is bigger
than one person."

How can you be a "destructive charismatic leader," as C.I.A. analysts call
him, when the president calls you "they," not even dignifying you with your
own pronoun?

The man who pulled off the most spectacularly vicious attack in the history
of terrorism, the man who made America feel vulnerable for the first time,
the man who spawned the Homeland Security Department wants the world to know
he's capable of calling the shots. He may call himself "the slave of God,"
but he is the slave of public attention.

"The notion of the selfless servant of the people committed to Islam against
the terrible West really totally misses the point of his being a profound
narcissist," said Jerrold Post, who founded the C.I.A.'s Political Psychology
Center to profile world leaders and world monsters. "Every one of
Osama's successes has further expanded his grandiosity." Dr. Post believes
Osama had a "narcissistic explosion" with 9/11. "Osama wanted to stare at tapes
of the buildings going down again and again," he said. He gloated and bragged
and wanted to know how his demonic demolition was playing back home in Saudi Arabia.

The Bush administration has strained to make Saddam and Osama teammates in
terror. But what if the spoiled Saudi rich boy and the thug in the fedora
waving a shotgun are competitors — like monomaniacal moguls running rival
studios?

In the new tape, Osama hails a bunch of recent terrorist acts and pointedly
doesn't even bother to mention Saddam's name. Saddam uses the mantle of
Islam only when it suits the cult of Saddam. The Iraqi despot — unfazed by the
Islamic ban on graven images — is too busy putting up pictures of himself, writing
his name on the bricks used torebuild the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and trying to
dominate cable as a world leader to do his part helping Osama with his Islam jihad.

With any luck, Osama's jealousy will so completely possess him that he will
go after Saddam himself.