Osama to exploit water reservoirs in 2005, says novel
By Paul Michaud
PARIS: A new French novel — Maudite soit ta source — (Damned be your Source, published by Editions Michalon in Paris) — authored pseudonymously by a high-level member of the French Secret Services and one of the country’s crack specialists on the Middle East, has it that not only is Osama bin Laden alive and living in the tribal territories of Pakistan, but also that the Al Qaeda leader will be around for quite a while to come.
For, the book is set four years after the World Trade Center attack, in 2005, and Osama bin Ladin — predicts the strategist based on some first-hand intelligence that only the French are capable of developing from their exceptional sources and ages-old experience with the Middle East — is expected by French planners to still be around by then, albeit as a symbolic figure, surpassed by one of his present lieutenants, an engineer specialising in hydraulics, for the war of the future, posits co-author Olivier Da Lage, will concern not aeroplanes or skyscrapers, but ... water.
Says Da Lage, a journalist with Radio France International who co-authored the novel with the mysterious “Jean-Paul Riondet,” water “happens to be one of the big subjects of contention of the forthcoming future, even bigger than oil, if that is conceivable. A very serious report published for the United Nations by the World Water Council [Conseil mondial de l’eau] has it that in 2025 water will have replaced oil as the natural resource most in demand, and will — because of the growing shortage of water resources — also have become the subject of contention, indeed of wars. Our novel — based much more upon fact than fiction has Al Qaeda exploiting the shortage for its own ends.”
As a result, notes Da Lage, the subversion of which Al Qaeda has already become a master these past few years takes on a much more subtler form.
“Rather than blow up US embassies in the region, the Al Qaeda terrorists decide to exploit the penury of water, and to push the world towards a crisis, they play on the geographical and political disequilibriums which sees — as with oil — certain parts of the world, blessed with more water than others. Oil may be thicker than water, but by then, the year 2005, water, in its special way, will not only weigh more on the future of the world than oil, it will also take on a much greater value, intrinsically as well as strategically.”
In the end, he adds, “the objective of Al Qaeda of 2005 will be to manipulate the world water situation, spreading havoc among the populations of the world — just as it did last year in the United States and in the West — and use the resulting political leverage the situation produces to bring about the fall of a number of — purposely non-identified — Arab regimes, and this to impose the Caliphate.”
Not to forget, says Da Lage, “that Bin Ladin himself noted to his disciples in a video-cassette released last December that ‘our arms are to be taken from the enemy,’ which was the case with the aircraft used in the World Trade Center attack of last September. Our starting point, indeed, is that you no longer need to align tanks, guns or missiles to score a point (against your enemy). You simply have to exploit the weaknesses of the countries that are targeted, by putting your finger on those spots where the pressure most hurts.”
As could have been expected — this is not an American “happy end” novel, but a French exercise in artistic and intellectual realism — the novel ends with a catastrophic bang, a most pessimistic ending.
“We couldn’t imagine anything else but a catastrophic ending, what else could we have come up with?,” asks Da Lage, who adds that “it’s evident today that the situation of the world has fallen beyond the control, the reach, of any kind of rational behaviour. So much for the present leadership of the world.”
“All you need to do is to set in motion a few cases of destabilization, and — as Osama bin Ladin and Al Qaeda have so well shown us — the destabilization that’s brought about will become self-fulfilling, will feed upon itself.”
As for the identity of his co-author, Da Lage won’t say who hides behind the “Jean-Paul Riondet” pseudonym, but other sources in the French secret services point to an intriguing array of big names of the French espionage sector — among them Philippe Rondot, the super-secret specialist on the Middle East (author of seminal works on Syria and Jordan) and the man who captured Carlos the Jackal in Sudan, or indeed Roland Jacquard, the specialist on Al Qaeda and a leading “consultant” to the United Nations who recently authored the world’s first biography of Osama bin Ladin, and says he knows the man, whom he’s observed quite a few years, like the back of his hand.
