No Straw MenEnlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, set up only to be confuted summarily.

“The Man Who Speaks to You of Sacrifice”

A version of this blog post appeared on Dollars and Crosses (January 7, 2004) and in the Hamilton College Spectator (January 23, 2004).

Earlier this year Saturday Night Live ran a skit on Islamic terrorists, who Osama bin Laden has just dispatched to martyr themselves for Allah—and for the 72 dark-haired virgins that await them in paradise. When somebody asks the bin Laden character why he isn’t sacrificing for the cause, he fumbles over his words, screams out something about Allah, and proceeds to dispatch another group of martyrs to die—in his stead.

Indeed, since the start of the Second Gulf War, whenever we heard from Saddam Hussein, he invariably exhorted friends, Romans and countrymen to fight the infidel—to sacrifice in the cause of a greater good. And yet, when we found him last night, the ex-dictator was in disguise and hiding, crouched in a six-by-eight-foot spider hole. Sure, he had a pistol, but even at this point of no return, he refused to martyr himself.

Ayn Rand explains, through Elsworth Toohey in her novel The Fountainhead (1943). “Don’t bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes. . . . It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. . . . The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”

Social theorist Chris Sciabarra draws the political implications. “Hussein, bin Laden, and other leaders of Islamic terrorism are fully capable of sacrificing their own people; they most assuredly do not wish to die themselves.” (Stalin, too, was a physical coward, terrified of death and gunfire, even of flying in airplanes.) It is therefore reasonable, Sciabarra continues, “that pointing a nuke at Baghdad”—the U.S. Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction—“can still have the required effect of keeping Hussein in check . . . Why would he have so many tunnels and escape routes under his various castles if living were not a priority?”

Addendum (11/24/2004): “For all the talks of virgins, paradise, and beautiful suicides, most of those who survived American firepower in Fallujah chose to run, hide, or be captured. After all, suicide is for young zealots, not pudgy men to whom life has become altogether too dear with its money, fame, and women in the here and now” (Victor Davis Hanson, “Misplaced Metaphors,” National Review Online).

Addendum (5/4/2011): True to type, when Navy Seals raided the million-dollar compound where bin Laden was hiding, they found him in a room on an upper floor, while his operatives tried to fight off the Seals on the first floor. Asks Christopher Hitchens, “Has there ever been a more contemptible leader from behind?” “Not for him,” Hitchens wrote years earlier, “the baring of the chest to the Crusader-Zionist bullets.”

Addendum (4/27/2012): While publicly calling for young men to join his holy war, bin Laden was privately advising that his son decamp for the prosperous kingdom of Qatar (Peter Bergen, “The Last Days of Obama bin Laden,” Time).

Addendum (8/30/2012): More details from the moments before U.S. bullets brought justice to the alleged prophet: “Searching bin Laden’s neatly organized room, Owen [a Navy Seal] found two guns—an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol—with empty chambers. ‘He hadn’t even prepared a defense. He had no intention of fighting. He asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly planes into buildings, but didn’t even pick up his weapon. In all of my deployments, we routinely saw this phenomenon. The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger a pussy he was.’”