In the 1970s, bin Laden attended courses at King Abd-al Aziz University in Jeddah, where he was taught among others by Muhammad Qutb. This instructor’s brother had been Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian fanatic (executed by the Nasser regime in 1966) whose paean of hatred against the United States, that Jew-dominated cesspit of incest, sodomy and fornication, has been the foundational text of al-Qaeda’s propagandists. Sayyid Qutb at least visited America and spent a little time there, whereas bin Laden has never evinced the least desire to learn about other cultures and societies from experience. However, he does seem to have developed a complex feeling of resentment and envy toward America and Americans. Though he spent some time on the Pakistan–Afghan border, helping to administer the distribution of Saudi-supplied aid and weapons to the mujahidin fighting against the Soviet occupation, he consistently denies credit to the United States for the decisive role it played in the demoralization and eventual defeat of the Red Army. This might be no more than an ordinary jealousy, except that it is suggestively replicated in the cases of Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina. When Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden asked the authorities in Riyadh to be appointed as a defender of the Saudi kingdom and the leader of an “Arab Afghan” contingent to fight against the godless Ba’athists. When this offer was rejected, he protested at the Saudi invitation to American troops to come and do the job instead. And, when a decade later it was proposed that Saddam Hussein be removed from the scene altogether, he threw all his weight into the opposite scale. If he himself was not to be the leader of the enterprise, it seems, then nothing would do. He loudly condemned Western inaction in the face of the “ethnic cleansing” conducted by Slobodan Milošević. But one would not know, from any of his extensive, rambling commentaries on world events, that the United States led two military expeditions to the Balkans, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, with the express purpose of preventing the mass expulsion and slaughter of largely Muslim populations. In the warped, selective world-view of bin Laden, it cannot be that the Satanic and Semitic United States has rescued or helped rescue several Muslim peoples—Afghans, Kuwaitis, Bosnians, Kosovars, and Iraqi Kurds and Sh’ites—from foreign occupation and/or genocide.
To describe this unstable combination, of extreme personal ambition and highly subjective “denial,” as “sound strategic and tactical sense,” in Michael Scheuer’s words, seems perverse at best. And especially so since it led bin Laden to commit the extraordinary error, based on the most egregious misreading, of launching a mass attack on American civilians on American soil. Consider for a moment the situation, from the point of view of jihad, as it was in the early fall of 2001. Having been expelled under American and Egyptian pressure from Sudan in 1996, when he was extremely fortunate to have avoided arrest and possible extradition, bin Laden had successfully relocated to Afghanistan, where he was to enjoy the patronage and protection of the newly installed Taliban. This put at his disposal the resources of a state, albeit a small and impoverished one, and allowed considerable scope for training camps and recruitment. In addition, he was favored by the Pakistani regime, which used the Taliban as its colonial proxy in Afghanistan, to supply “strategic depth” in the long-running confrontation with India. Within Pakistan itself, Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers were to be found even in the upper echelons of the nuclear program. Meanwhile the Saudis, loyal to the cynical pact that earned Wahhabi clerical endorsement of the ruling dynasty in return for heavy subsidy of Wahhabi clericalism, were putting billions of dollars at the disposal of madrassas and mujahidin alike. Spectacular attacks on a relatively ambitious scale, on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in Yemen, and on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, were carried out with near-impunity and did not succeed in evoking any very determined American response.
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that the thought of God’s existence was unbearable, because one could not aspire to be God. It can only have been some kind of theistic megalomania that persuaded bin Laden, in these otherwise highly propitious circumstances for his movement, that the next step should take the form of an insane gamble: an outright assault on the American heartland. And it can only have been under the influence of beliefs that were, indeed, “irrational in the extreme” that he further concluded that such an attack would constitute a knockout blow. He was to persist in this folly for some time after 11 September, telling Al Jazeera’s veteran correspondent Taysir Alluni, in an interview on 21 October 2001, that it would be very much easier to destroy the American empire than it had been to bring down the Soviet one. On the same occasion, he generalized wildly from some random stock-market reports to “prove” that the American economy would not recover from the damage the nineteen martyrs had inflicted on it. (An especially pathetic example of his style: “One of the well-known American hotel companies, Intercontinental, has fired 20,000 employees, thanks to God’s grace.”)
Whether it was because of the fantasy of divine endorsement or because he exaggerated the ignominious American scuttle from a relatively minor commitment in Somalia, bin Laden committed the sin of hubris on a colossal scale. I wrote at the time that he had done the West an enormous unintentional service, by in effect blowing the whistle on his own global plot. Wherever he went, immediately after Tora Bora in 2001, it cannot have been where he had wanted or expected to be. And he had lost his control over the Afghan state (running away even as his Taliban “hosts” took heavy casualties) while badly compromising his relations with the ruling circles in Riyadh and Islamabad. However, not even I was prepared, at the time, to believe that he had readied no follow-up strategy of any sort. Even the most low-level thug, from Northern Ireland to Lebanon, had learned by then to rig another car bomb at the other end of the square, to immolate the remaining civilians as they try to catch their breath, and to maim and kill the arriving medical personnel. (I was briefly convinced that the anthrax-laden packages in the U.S. mail had been designed for this psychological purpose.) But it seemed that there was to be no second wave and that bin Laden had indeed been duped by his own propaganda. Surveying that annoyingly serene visage of his, it turned out, I had been failing to understand that it was the expression of a man untroubled by doubt, and fanatically convinced of his own faultless rectitude. Such men are indeed a danger to us, but they are a deadly danger to those who blindly trust and follow them. As James Fenton puts it in his poem Prison Island, “Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.”
I now consider myself further vindicated by the findings from the Abbottabad raid (in which the awful words “Black Hawk down,” uttered in the first few minutes of the operation, led not to panic and despair and self-flagellation but to the cool and calm deployment of another helicopter). Internal discussions captured on disc and tape show bin Laden fretfully casting about for a way to duplicate the impact of 9/11, and again to take the war to “the far enemy,” while many of his deputies argue for lower-cost and lower-risk “operations” against softer targets nearer at hand; Afghan schoolgirls, perhaps, or Egyptian Christians. Or maybe another frontal assault on culture, like the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the treasures of the Afghan national museum. This sorry dispute, surely, was a dank and dismal way for the “pious, charismatic, gentle, generous, talented and personally courageous Muslim” to spend his final days. It also seems to have been the nearest he ever got to anything approaching self-criticism.
I also consider myself vindicated, this time not only against Michael Scheuer but against people like Bruce Lawrence, whose introduction to bin Laden’s collected speeches (printed by the publishing arm of New Left Review) compared him to Che Guevara: a comparison certainly not intended as critical. How often have we read, in an attempt to give a shallow patina of “liberation theology” to bin Ladenism, that he set himself against the numerous regional dictatorships that enjoyed an overwarm relationship with Washington? Yet of all these despotisms, is there a worse example than that of Pakistan? Part military dictatorship and part Islamic theocracy,
merciless in its exploitation and neglect of the poor, callous in its discrimination against minorities such as the Baluchis, exorbitant in its corruption, a rogue system in respect of the illegal sale and active proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the paymaster and protector of Osama bin Laden. In return, he lent his forces to Pakistan’s Talibanization of Afghanistan and to the export of sectarian violence across the Kashmiri frontier with India. This sordid relationship was well known long before the exposure of the Abbottabad compound, which only reemphasized bin Laden’s parasitic client relationship with Islamabad, and showed him to be a villa-dwelling dependent and not an ascetic cave-dwelling guerrilla. If there is a nastier despotism than that of Pakistan, it is probably Sudan, with whose rulers bin Laden had an almost symbiotic business and ideological relationship, in his capacity as the chair of a crooked multinational corporation, until 1996. More recently, he threatened the use of deadly force against United Nations peacekeepers if any attempt was made to arrest Sudan’s flagrant campaign of racist murder against the African population of Darfur.
Surveying the other dictatorships of the area, whether pro-American or otherwise, can one argue that al-Qaeda did anything to challenge their rule or hasten their recent demise? The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, now fully exposed as a murderous one-man and one-party state, helped facilitate the transit of jihadists into Iraq, where the forces of al-Qaeda made a military alliance with the former security services of the Saddam Hussein regime, and blew up the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra with the undisguised aim of unleashing a confessional war between Sunni and Shi’a. The Saudi system did attract bin Laden’s hostility, but only because he considered its repressive brand of Wahhabi Islam to be insufficiently dogmatic and fundamentalist. It was chiefly in the more open and tolerant countries, such as Turkey and Tunisia and Morocco, that al-Qaeda used its methods of indiscriminate bombing and killing, against such targets as historic synagogues and tourist cafes.
Dotted throughout bin Laden’s later sermons, in a rather too obvious attempt to ingratiate himself with a certain strand of radical opinion, there are some puerile or sophomoric allusions to the Kyoto treaty on global warming, along with recommendations of the essays of Noam Chomsky and the films of Michael Moore. But these gestures are eclipsed by the foam-flecked passages in which he accuses the United States of inventing the AIDS virus, or of being the prey of homosexuals and the gambling industry. And hovering over all of this, so crudely and so obviously that some people apparently ceased to notice it, is always the central theme: the self-granting of general permission to take certain kinds of life. President Bush was wrong to say that this was an attack on “America”: long before 9/11 the full weight of such arrogations was being felt by the Hazara population of Afghanistan, and by Indians, whether secular or Hindu.
Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.
It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was “a war without end.” I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one. Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones. As Bertold Brecht’s character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat. But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for. As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden’s carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.
The Enemy Page 2