Through Our Enemies' Eyes

by Michael Scheuer

  After reviewing what bin Laden has said since first speaking to the Western media in late 1993, there appeared inescapably, for me, a stark contrast between what I considered to be bin Laden’s clear, calm, and carefully chosen words and the media’s portrait of him as a more-or-less blood-crazed “terrorist.” This is true of the U.S. press in particular, presumably because, as Ronald Steel wrote in 1996 in the New Republic, “We [Americans] do not consider ourselves threatening. Puzzled when vilified, we assume our accusers must be demented.”2 It was clear bin Laden automatically was placed by the West’s journalists and terrorism experts in the traditional terrorist category, where the only important issues are who or what bin Laden attacked, the method of attack, and how future attacks could be prevented. What bin Laden had been saying about why he and his al Qaeda forces were attacking was given short shrift. British journalist Robert Fisk hit the mark in this regard in an article in the Independent on 22 August 1998 in which he argued,

  The use of the word “terrorist”—where Arabs who murder innocents are always called “terrorists” whereas Israeli killers who slaughter 29 Palestinians in a Hebron Mosque or assassinate their prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, are called extremists—is only part of the problem. “Terrorist” is a word that avoids all meaning. The who and the how are of essential importance. But the “why” is usually something the West prefers to avoid. Not once yesterday [21 August 1998, the day after U.S. cruise missile attacks on bin Laden-related targets in Afghanistan and Sudan]—not in a single press statement, press conference or interview—did a U.S. leader or diplomat explain why the enemies of America hate America. Why is bin Laden so angry with the United States? Why—just not who and how—but why did anyone commit the atrocities in East Africa?3

  One wonders if Americans would understand what Osama bin Laden meant, or believe he meant it, if the media presented the material of what he actually said to them. Many Americans and other Westerners appear to be nearing the point where few will attach much importance to what public persons say because the mass audience cynically believes everything is said for personal advantage, shock value, or to prolong a photo opportunity, not because the speaker is sincere and therefore has something worth considering. Even our public persons at times seem unable to hear, let alone understand, what foreign public persons are saying. When asked if the anti-U.S. anger of the Muslim world toward the United States was mistaken, for example, a senior U.S. State Department official said, “I believe it is. I don’t think we consider it unimportant, but we believe it is misplaced, misdirected, it misperceives American policy.” After reflecting, the official blithely disclosed he did not understand what bin Laden and other Islamists are saying. “Maybe it [Muslim anger] means,” the official said, “that we need to continue to do a better job with our public diplomacy, in getting the story over to the [Muslim] people.”4 In other words, the world’s unsophisticated and uninformed Muslims neither understand the altruism of U.S. foreign policy nor that the policy is designed for their own good.

  This sort of deafness, arrogance, and cynicism does not much matter when Americans listen to entertainment-world celebrities; after all, often little wisdom or common sense can be had from athletes, movie stars, and media personalities. When the same factors are consistently applied to domestic and foreign political, religious, social, or intellectual leaders, however, the issue becomes more troubling, because threats to our society and nation remain unresolved, even unrecognized. In this scenario, problems are left to fester and, more dangerous, are not understood, because people assume their leaders are either crying wolf or seeking personal advantage. In essence, people turn inward, stop listening, and go about their business: making a buck, paying the mortgage, and putting the kids through college.

  This auditory cynicism is most dangerous for Americans when they are listening to foreigners who are America’s implacable enemies. This cynicism, combined with traditional American insularity and the post-1990 absence of a single, steady, and credible nation-state threat, makes it likely we will miss the importance of what our foes are saying. This seems to have been the case with Osama bin Laden. While we all have seen and viscerally felt the damage bin Laden has unleashed on the United States, most do not have a coherent understanding of what motivates the threat his movement poses. Or, if some have heard what he has said—such phrases as, “If we cut off the head of America, the kingdoms in the Arab world will cease to exist”5—they have dismissed it as hyperbolic rhetoric meant to win notoriety and thereby have missed the substantial kernel of truth at the statement’s core.

  This is the road to disaster, for the positions and forces bin Laden has presented are a far more lethal and varied threat than that posed by any of those we have labeled as “terrorists” over the past quarter century. The strength of his personality and message is likely to lead to an enduring legacy that will long survive his own departure from the scene. Muntasir al-Zayyat, a prominent Islamist lawyer and longtime friend of bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, warned the West not to try to fit bin Laden and other Islamist leaders into the traditional definition of terrorists. In a 1999 interview with the London-based journal Al-Wasat, al-Zayyat said that,

  they [the Americans] deal with Usama Bin Ladin, [Gam’at al-Islamiyah spiritual leader] Shaykh Umar Abd-al-Rahman, and [Egytian Islamic Jihad chief] Ayman al-Zawahiri, as if they were carbon copies of [the] international terrorist Carlos, and that reflects their inability to understand the facts of the matter. Carlos was a terrorist whose activities stopped when he was arrested. The fundamentalist movement’s leaders are ideas, a heritage, a stature, and principles that do not disappear when they disappear.6

  For present purposes, debating the legitimacy of bin Laden’s theological justifications is not necessary. This study is narrowly focused to outline what bin Laden has said and done and to estimate the impact of those things in the Muslim world; to assess bin Laden as a person—his leadership capabilities, organization, and future intentions, and the historical and religious contexts in which he is acting; and to assess what all this means for U.S. interests. At day’s end, this study will suggest that the threat America faces from bin Laden is not the episodic terrorist campaign typical of those perpetrated by traditional terrorist groups. It is rather a worldwide, religiously inspired, and professionally guided Islamist insurgency against “Christian Crusaders and Jews,” which is being waged by groups bin Laden has controlled, directed, and inspired.

  Bin Laden has claimed that the United States has waged “a war against Muslims” since 1945, and that he and his allies “are only striving to give it a fitting reply.”7 A senior Egyptian Islamist has said that bin Laden intends to incite “guerrilla warfare against Israeli and American interests not only in Arab and Muslim countries but everywhere in the world.”8 And the literature suggests the al Qaeda forces he has created will continue to attack U.S. interests at home and abroad and will use the weapons they have at hand or can acquire, be they daggers, Kalashnikovs, car bombs, or chemical/biological weapons.

  The forces of bin Laden, then, are waging war on America in God’s name; they have made it clear that their goal is not the tactical one of inflicting pain, but the strategic one of defeating the United States “in the same way in which the USSR suffered humiliation at the hands of the Afghan and Arab mujahedin in Afghanistan.”9

  In the United States before the events of 11 September 2001, however, there was almost no recognition that bin Laden’s war is well under way. The first step in countering the forces that bin Laden has established is to listen more patiently to what he said in the past and to understand the personal, historical, and geopolitical contexts in which he thought, spoke, and acted. Americans also need to answer a question asked by the attorney for one of the attackers of the U.S. embassy in Kenya. “Why [are] many young people … willing to kill themselves to strike America,” defense attorney David P. Baugh asked during the trial of the East Africa bombers. “Why does bin Laden and al Qaeda have
more young people willing to die than projects they can do?” For starters, perhaps it is best to let bin Laden describe his intentions. In late 1998, ABC’s John Miller reported that bin Laden used a soft, grandfatherly voice to warn the United States of his plans:

  So we tell the Americans as people, and we tell the mothers of American soldiers and American mothers in general, that if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews. The continuation of tyranny will bring the fight to America, as [convicted World Trade Center bomber] Ramzi Yousef and others did. This is my message to the American people: to look for a serious government that looks out for their interests and does not attack others, their lands, or their honor. And my word to American journalists is not to ask why we did that [attack U.S. targets] but ask what their government has done that forced us to defend ourselves.10

  Having kept bin Laden’s promise to bring the war to U.S. soil, al Qaeda forces are now absorbing the U.S. military response, which, to date, has been the usual post–cold war application of overwhelming air power, this time seasoned with small numbers of ground troops mostly anchored to static positions. Notwithstanding the damage al Qaeda and the Taliban have suffered—which, as will be seen, is of consequence—bin Laden’s forces now have the United States where they have wanted it, on the ground in Afghanistan where Islamist insurgents can seek to reprise their 1980s’ victory over the Red Army. Al Qaeda now has the chance to prove bin Laden’s thesis that the United States cannot maintain long-term, casualty-producing military engagements, and bin Laden’s forces are surely praising God for the opportunity. In this regard, Al-Quds Al-Arabi editor Abd-al-Bari Atwan has written, “We, who know Shaykh Osama bin Laden, can say definitely that he is now living his happiest days because he has been waiting for the day when Americans get embroiled in Afghanistan.”11 With Washington also committed on the ground in the Philippines, and seemingly set for similar commitments in Yemen and Somalia, al Qaeda is getting the multifront war with U.S. forces it has long wanted. Time will tell if its “happiest days” will last, but for now, bin Laden’s forces are eager to lead Muslims to victory in what bin Laden has called “the most dangerous, fiercest, and most savage Crusade war launched against Islam.”

  God willing, the end of America is imminent. Its end is not dependent on the survival of this slave of God. Regardless if Osama is killed or survives, the awakening has started, praise be to God. This was the point of these [11 September 2001] operations…. In a previous interview with ABC television, I warned that if it [the United States] enters into a conflict with the sons of the two holy mosques, America will forget the horrors of Vietnam. This, indeed, was the case; praised be God. What is to come is even greater, God willing.12

  The names and terms and documentary and media sources associated with bin Laden’s world are complex, sometimes confusing, and ever changing. To aid the reader’s navigation of the material in this book, a glossary of names and terms and a section of notes on sources are included following the epilogue.

  Middle East

  Central and Southeast Asia

  I

  CONTEXT

  1

  CONTEXT FOR UNDERSTANDING BIN LADEN’S AIMS

  To shape policy and actions to nullify the threat posed by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, we, in the West, must first understand the man and the underlying circumstances that brought him to the forefront of a movement that has effectively learned how to take advantage of the functioning of a free society to do us harm. I think we in the United States can best come to grips with this phenomena by realizing that bin Laden’s philosophy and actions have embodied many of the same sentiments that permeate the underpinnings of concepts on which the United States itself is established. This can be illustrated, I think, with reference to the writings or actions of such seminal figures in our history as John Brown, John Bunyan, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine.

  According to his closest Muslim associates and many of the Westerners who have interviewed him, Osama bin Laden appears to be a genuinely pious Muslim; a devoted family man; a talented, focused, and patient insurgent commander; a frank and eloquent speaker; a successful businessman; and an individual of conviction, intellectual honesty, compassion, humility, and physical bravery. It is ironic that this man today leads an ideological and military force with more lethal potential than any other nonstate threat faced by the United States. Although U.S. leaders have rightly decided to confront bin Laden with military means, their recognition of the motivation and destructive power of the bin Laden phenomenon remains superficial. Witness the eagerness of the United States to move on to fight Iraq even before a war against bin Laden had begun. To gauge the seriousness and likely extended length of this war, our leaders can do no better than to accept at face value bin Laden’s belief that the United States is intent on destroying Muslims, their religion, and the Islamic world; he has said that U.S. leaders have the same respect for Muslims and their God as Europe’s Catholic Crusaders had for his coreligionists nine centuries ago.

  Armed and inspired with these beliefs, bin Laden has focused on rallying the world’s Muslims and inciting them to wage a defensive jihad against what he has described as the onslaught of the United States and its Western and Arab allies. The goals of this jihad continue to be to annihilate what is seen as the brutal U.S.-led enemies of Islam—the Crusaders, as bin Laden has called them—to restore to Muslims their dignity, holy places, and lost territory; and to reestablish what they see as the purity of God’s rule across the Islamic world. In essence, bin Laden has called for a worldwide version of the successful defensive jihad Muslims waged for more than a decade against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

  Bin Laden has publicly outlined his military plans and intentions with precision. Despite the warfare that has now reached U.S. soil, most Americans still have paid little heed to his words. They regard him as a terrorist with above-average skills, but still an isolated lethal nuisance. As Professor James T. Johnson has written in his insightful book, The Holy War Concept in Christian and Islamic Traditions, “the contemporary [Western] perception [of jihad] tends to reduce it to terrorism—uses of violence whose forms and targets make it deeply repugnant to Western sensibilities.”1 That this could be a fatal misconception is argued fully below. For now it suffices to say that the dominance of the secular fundamentalists in American and Western elites, along with the pacifism and fear of defending moral absolutes in much of Christendom’s religious establishments, leave Americans singularly unprepared to understand what bin Laden is saying, the historical context and religious tradition in which he is acting, and the danger posed by the forces he inspires. Professor Johnson goes on to warn that the West does not comprehend the “contemporary phenomenon of holy war,” which has “become an object of suspicion from both the secular and Christian perspectives.”

  As a result of the fundamental cultural rejection of war for religion by the West in the early modern period, it has been especially difficult for Western culture to accept and make sense of the ongoing presence of the phenomenon of war for the faith in modern Muslim societies….

  We mistake it for an anachronism from the past, an expression of more primitive, less developed minds and societies. We consider it something that has no place in modern secular society, and so by definition alien and threatening. We confuse it with something that we ourselves know very little about, the nature of holy war and its role in Western culture and history. And finally, we grasp it only dimly because it is rooted in a close connection between religion and politics, a connection we in the West either do not make or find uncomfortable.2

  Simply put, the United States and the West have little useful context in which to try to understand Osama bin Laden. The aim of this study is to provide some of this missing context from the works of historians, Western and Muslim journalists, expert commentators, and, most especially, the words of
Osama bin Laden himself. I also will use several analogies from Anglo-American history that are meant to show that bin Laden’s character, religious certainty, moral absolutism, military ferocity, integrity, and all-or-nothing goals are not much different from those of individuals whom we in the United States have long identified and honored as religious, political, or military heroes; men such as John Brown, John Bunyan, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine. I do not argue that these are exact analogies, but only that they are analogies that seemed pertinent as I researched bin Laden. In the case of John Bunyan, in fact, there is a wide divergence between his goals and those sought by the other individuals noted. Brown, Jefferson, Henry, and Paine were eager to overthrow the existing political order. Bin Laden’s philosophy shares this aim and means to change the world. In contrast, Bunyan “kept his mind on ‘that world which is to come’” and “was expressly loyal … publicly condemning apparent rebellion as loudly as possible.”3