CLOUD CUCKOO CAVE:

Can Al Qaeda Survive the Revolts?: Dictators weren’t the only ones caught offguard by the sweep of revolts across the Middle East—so was Al Qaeda. Bruce Riedel on how the revolutions will affect the future of global jihad. (Bruce Riedel, 2/25/11, Daily Beast)

Al Qaeda had nothing to do with the Jasmine revolution in Tunis that began the winter of Arab revolutions, nor did it have anything to do with the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. In both cases its various media mouthpieces were remarkably slow to catch up with events. Osama bin Laden has yet to utter one word about the changes in his native Arab world. But time will give it a chance to recover. Egypt especially matters enormously to al Qaeda as the center of the Arab world—its historic, demographic and cultural heart. How events play out in Egypt will directly impact al Qaeda’s ideology and narrative profoundly.

Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian number two in al Qaeda, was silent about the revolution that removed his nemesis until last week. He released the first of what promises to be several messages on the revolution through Sahab media (which literally means ‘in the clouds”). In this first commentary Zawahiri only repeated well-worn al Qaeda propaganda. Mubarak was a stooge of the American embassy. The Egyptian state is a creation of western imperialism. The great villain of Egypt is Napoleon Bonaparte! His 1798 invasion was the first plot “to call for the Jews to settle in Palestine,” Zawahiri claims, prefiguring Israel by a century and a half. Al Qaeda urges the complete overthrow of the corrupt Egyptian state, imposition of Islamic Sharia law, and Egypt’s merger into a new caliphate.

All of this is old stuff from Ayman (even the charge that Napoleon was a closet Zionist). This probably reflects the fact that what happened in Egypt is a total contradiction of al Qaeda’s ideology and he is playing catch up.