Thought Docket

During the run-up to the election, then-candidate Obama sometimes roiled conservatives with his talk about talking with the likes of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But he spoke pretty tough about Osama Bin Laden. Me, I like the tough talk when referring to terrorists and tyrants. So I appreciated Obama’s pledge, stated during the October 7 debates:

We will kill Bin Laden.  We will crush Al Qaeda.  That has to be our biggest national security priority.

Just today, on cnn.com, there was an article about the next administration’s intention to “ratchet up [the] hunt” for Bin Laden. Read the article here.

The article states the obvious: It won’t be easy. But I found this passage quite interesting, and unexpected:

“If you think of this as sort of a combination of [the hunt for] Eric Rudolph, who was the Olympic bomber, and the movie ‘Deliverance,’ multiplied by a factor of 10, that’s really what you’re focusing on in trying to find bin Laden,” said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan.

Eric Rudolph (aka the Olympic Park Bomber) is the bomber of the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, during the 1996 Olympics.  As a fugitive, Rudolph lived in his makeshift mountain camps of the Snowbird and Tusquitee Mountains.  He ate acorns and salamanders and pilfered grain from nearby silos. And it is suspected that Rudolph had the assistance of sympathizers as he eluded law enforcement. So I understand the analogy with Bin Laden, presumed to be hiding out in caves of the mountainous tribal region of Pakistan.

But Deliverance?  I consider Deliverance to be one of the all-time great movies. However, it is in no way an enjoyable two hours. Deliverance tells the story of four Atlanta businessmen that decide to take a canoe trip down a river that is scheduled to be flooded by a soon-to-be-constructed dam.  The men run into some hillbillies and some distasteful scenes ensue. [If you have never seen Deliverance, do yourself a favor.  Stop reading now and go rent the movie. But don' see it on a first date.]

Deliverance explores conflicts on numerous levels:

• An internal struggle experienced by Ed (played by Jon Voight) over the taking of life.
• A struggle between two friends as Lewis (Burt Reynolds) and Drew (Ronny Cox) share different views on whether to inform the authorities.
• A struggle between classes as the city slickers show disdain toward the mountain folk and the mountain folk show indifference to their guests.
• A struggle between the city slickers and mother nature.
• A struggle by Bobby (played by Ned Beatty) to survive a rape by a sadistic mountain man.

I am still unsure, though, about how Deliverance might relate to finding Bin Laden.

• Maybe it’s an internal struggle, internal to the US, over the use of force against military targets that intentionally expose civilians to danger.
• Maybe it’s a struggle between two friends (sort of) that share a different views on the nature and extent of Pakistan’s central government’s role in rooting out Bin Laden and the Taliban and on the role of US forces in the region.
• Maybe it’s a class struggle between classes - the US forces (the city slickers) and the Wazir tribes of Pakistan (the mountain folks).
• Maybe it is a struggle with nature - the rugged and unfamiliar terrain of Waziristan.

Feel free to share your thoughts via comment.

In the mean time, I hope Osama has difficulty sleeping at night.  Maybe he stays up thinking about this:

Squeal Like a Pig

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under War On Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.