WHAT MAKES BIN LADEN TICK?

He hates the Jews. That's what makes him tick. Everything he does is motivated by one thing -- anti-Semitism.* Ditto for his inner circle. So said Peter Bergen, author of "The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al-Qaeda's Leader," at an on-the-record meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York earlier this week. This may not be surprising to you, but Bergen's insistence on this point -- it was one of the key points of his talk -- struck me as astonishing because it sounded like too great a simplification. But there it was.

From everything Bergen knows, and he is no slouch in the Bin Laden department, having interviewed the man and written a previous book about him, "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden," the al-Qaeder leader is so obsessed by his hatred of Jews that it colors everything he says and does not just about Israel but about America and Europe and, frankly, any place on the planet that fails to match his obsession. And even then he may not be placated. Think Saudi Arabia.

(Given the recent cartoon backlash, will Muslim gunmen surround the furrin relations council's elegant Manhattan headquarters on the Upper East Side and demand an apology? Will ambassadors to the United States be recalled? And when it gets out that Bergen's presentation was part of his publisher's promotional campaign for "The Osama Bin Laden I Know," will that put The Free Press at risk? Don't forget, it also published "Holy War, Inc." And how about other American publishers, or booksellers that stock the titles?)

One of the most surprising things Bergen said -- surprising to me at least, though I'm sure not to the experts who have followed the story closely -- is that Bin Laden's innermost circle has debated the wisdom of the 9/11 attacks. Bergen, right, said that some of Bin Laden's closest associates believe 9/11 was a strategic mistake. The reason? While it was a tactical and propaganda victory, 9/11 resulted in al-Qaeda getting kicked out of Afghanistan. Everyone knows that, of course, and that the loss of its key base of operations has led to major disruptions in the network's ability to organize and execute its plans. But who knew debate was even allowed within Bin Laden's hearing?

Which brings up something else Bergen said. Contrary to the received wisdom huckstered by the U.S. regime to the American public, Bin Laden is not isolated from information in some dark cave, but rather well informed about world events (even watches "Larry King Live") and, far from being out of it (if he's in a cave, which Bergen doesn't believe), is certainly in charge of al-Qaeda (along with Ayman al-Zawahiri, who created the organization with him). And in case you were wondering, Bin Laden is not suffering from any life-threatening illnesses, Bergen said. He also noted that Bin Laden is very smart (despite his single-minded anti-Semitism), physically brave, and unlikely to be captured, preferring to die for his cause.

The best outcome and the least likely, Bergen said, would be for Bin Laden to fade into oblivion. More probable and also the worst outcome, he said, is that he would become a martyr, as he has claimed he would. ("I take him completely at face value," Bergen told Al Jazeera, also in an interview earlier this week, reiterating what he said at the furrin council. "He will martyr himself." Read that interview. It's fascinating and repeats much else Bergen said at the council, although he makes no mention of Bin Laden's motivating anti-Semitism. Was he not asked about it? Probably not. But then he wasn't asked about it at the council either. He just volunteered it right off the bat.)

Coupla other things Bergen said that took me by surprise:

• The Pakistani press is very courageous. It reports information about al-Qaeda that never gets out to the world press.

• The real recruits for al-Qaeda do not come from the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) in Pakistan and other Muslim nations considered spawning grounds for terrorists -- again contrary to the received wisdom -- but from universities and other institutions of higher learning in the West, mainly European. Bergen joked that the London School of Economics is far more dangerous than any madrassa.

(A bit of research shows that he has said this before, for example, in an op-ed piece called "The Madrassa Myth," published last June in The New York Times: "While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed, there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West." And since we're at it, here's another piece worth reading, an interview with Bergen published in September 2004 by The Jamestown Foundation's Global Terrorism Analysis Web site).

• The battleground for al-Qaeda terrorists these days is Europe's vulnerable cities, where the war on terrorism is now focused, not in America. If there were some sort of radiological attack on a U.S. city, Bergen said, he had no doubt there would be huge casualties. But such an attack wouldn't be easy to execute, and huge casualties notwithstanding, it would not change America's way of life. No more, in any case, than the Aum Shinrikyo cult's 1995 sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo changed Japan's way of life. Bergen did say, however, that the Aum attack was more of a model for an urban attack in the U.S. than the recent terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, for two examples, and he doesn't understand why more attention hasn't been paid by U.S. intelligence and security agencies to the Aum model.

• He also can't understand why U.S. intelligence agencies haven't been able to track down Bin Laden by tracing the route(s) taken by his and al-Zawahiri's video and cassette releases to Al Jazeera, especially since there have been about three dozen of them since 9/11. Not to put too fine a point on it, he finds it incomprehensible that basic surveillance wouldn't have gone a long way to tracing the routes back to their source.

• Finally, the notion that the U.S. and al-Qaeda are caught up in a "clash of civilizations" is bunk, Bergen said. Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network, as awful as they are, do not present an existential threat to the West. No matter what the Bullshitter-in-Chief says about them, they can't hold a candle to the threat of the World War II Nazis.

All of this comes from an establishment journalist, remember, someone who does not necessarily take the establishment line but who also does not take seriously the Chomskyan view of U.S. policies, as he told me privately. So I'm not talking Robert Fisk here. (In fact, Bergen's opinion of Fisk is mixed: "Great reporter, terrific writer, brilliant and brave. A neo-Chomskyan. His reportage should be labeled commentary.") I'm talking Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst, adjunct professor at John Hopkins University, and one very smart fella with a crisp Oxford accent. That accent may strike you as tsk-tsk, but I was impressed.

Postscript: * Regarding the term "anti-Semitism," common usage means hatred of Jews. That is how I've used it. But the term is technically complicated, and in reference to Arabic anti-Semites replete with contradictions: See this.