The Religion of the Strong Horse

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,” Osama bin Laden said at the beginning of his talk taking credit for the 9/11 attacks. The line launched a thousand geopolitical analyses, was quoted by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times and was pored over endlessly by experts who completely missed the point. Osama bin Laden was not talking about great powers or nations, he was talking about Islam. “There is only one goaL,” Bin Laden continued, the supremacy of Islam. He followed that up with a quote from a...