March 10, 2007

DOES BIN LADEN HAVE A DIRECT LINE TO ALLAH: HORSEFEATHERS REVIEWS THE LOOMING TOWER

Once every few hundred years an individual is born who single-handedly, for good or ill, changes the world forever. Jesus was one such individual, Hitler, another. These individuals are endowed with exactly the right set of personal characteristics which will combine with the exactly right set of accidental opportunities to create a transcendant event, immutable and irreversible. Perhaps Osama Bin Laden was such an individual. So suggests Lawrence Wright in “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11.”

“One can ask, at this point, whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it. The answer is certainly not. Indeed…history [was] promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest…. Al-Qaeda depended on a unique conjunction of personalities, in particular the Egyptians—Zawahiri, Abu Ubaydah….But without bin Laden, the Egyptians were only…parochial. At a time when there were many Islamist movements, all of them concentrated on nationalist goals, it was bin Laden’s vision to create an international jihad corps. It was his leadership that held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile. It was bin Laden’s tenacity that made him deaf to the moral quarrels that attended the murder of so many and indifferent to the repeated failures that would have destroyed most men’s dreams. All of these were qualities that one can ascribe to a cult leader or a madman. But there was also the artistry involved, not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required.”

Wright’s book is about others—Zawahiri and John P. O’Neill, the heroic G-Man who was killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center; and also about the outrageous struggle between the CIA and FBI to keep each from getting important information which might have prevented the catastrophe. But the central focus of the book is on the evolution of Al-Qaeda and bin Laden as an international terrorist.

Wright is a master storyteller endowed with the integrity and conscience of a historian, resulting in a trustworthy and compelling narrative.

Bin Laden’s story begins with his father, Mohammed bin Laden. “One cannot understand the scale of the son’s ambition without appreciating the father’s accomplishment. Remote and powerful but humble in manner….He presented a formidable model to a young man who idolized him and hoped to equal, if not surpass, his achievements.”

Mohammed bin Laden, an illiterate but clever young man, fled a severe drought in Yemen to go to Arabia in the early thirties, before oil had been discovered. At that time it was a poor and desolate place where the economy had to survive on the few tourists who might make their once-in-a-lifetime visit to Mecca. In 1931, bin Laden could find work only as a dockworker in Jeddah. But soon after oil became a major interest in the country he became a bricklayer for Aramco. He was quickly recognized by American engineers as a hard-working, exacting builder of projects too small for the major contractors, and was supported by Aramco in his entrepreneurial efforts.

Gradually and in small increments bin Laden’s reputation grew and he became increasingly close to the royal family by responding to their special needs and palatial whims. Eventually his loyalty was rewarded when a British contractor defaulted on a project to build a highway between Jeddah and Medina; the contract was given to bin Laden at the same fee that would have been paid to the foreign company.

In the following years—the fifties—there were countless building projects—highways, major mosques, palaces, the bureaucracies at the new capital city of Riyadh—resulting in a consortium of bin Laden companies collectively known as the Saudi bin Laden Group, one of the largest construction companies in the world.

Although he became immensely wealthy and was on close terms with the Royal Family and all of the important people in the Kingdom, he lived quietly and unpretentiously in Jeddah in a large ramshackle house with his many wives and 57 children. Although most of them yearned for his companionship, he saw them infrequently and when he did he was distant and frugal in his communications.

Osama was especially frustrated in this respect for bin Laden divorced his mother when he was four or five and he went to live with his new stepfather not too far from the large house where his 25 brothers lived. Perhaps this circumstance had to do with the fact that even though Osama was sent to the same fine school as his brothers, he did not do well there and in fact left school. His brothers went on, succeeded educationally and went into the family business while Osama remained to some degree alienated from the rest of his sibs and their interests.

Wright can only provide a fragmented picture of bin Laden’s childhood and youth, barely enough to suggest connections between his past and his role as apocalyptic leader.
He saw himself, early on, as an authority in his immediate family—perhaps even superseding his stepfather. Everyone around him felt his self-confidence and charisma. He was often lost in his own thoughts and fantasies, which probably contributed to the fact that he was not a superior student in school and unlike his brothers dropped out of college. At about age fourteen he became extremely pious, excessively religious and anxious about matters of sexuality. This soon led to a preoccupation with the puritanical spirit of radical Islam and to his studying the works of Sayyid Qutb. It was a short step from there to his joining the Muslim Brotherhood, which at that time had more benign political aims than its successors eventually adopted.

What stands out from the fragments of information from that period of his life is his unswerving dedication to his own beliefs and views, and his incapacity to be influenced by others.

Al-Qaeda did not spring suddenly from bin Laden’s imagination. He is not an instigator, an entrepreneur of terror; if anything, he is a capitalist of terror, the supporter of schemes. Al-Qaeda emerged gradually out of the struggles among a number of radical Islamic groups, beginning with the Muslim Brotherhood, and between them and the various governments hostile to their theocratic aims. After the withdrawal of the infidel Soviets from Afghanistan in 1988, many of these splintered Jihadist groups tried to unify themselves into an effective group which came to be known as Qaeda—the base. There were several leaders among these groups, but bin Laden was thought to be the central figure because of his wealth and contacts in Saudi Arabia; also important was Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, who is now deputy leader of Al-Qaeda but in the early days was the leader of an anti-Egyptian terror group and had clear ideas for a jihadi strategy which included the murder of even innocent muslim women and children—a jihad notion known as takfir. And although there were others opposed to Zawahiri, the latter saw bin Laden as the carrier of his own ideas. He would supply the direction to the movement and bin Laden would be the nominal leader—the Sheik—and supply the money. So Al-Qaeda came into being in 1988 as an attempt to unify the splintered radical Islamists, but without any articulated antagonism yet against America or the West. Each of the various factions was primarily interested in bringing a purer form of Islam to its respective country.

For the next three or four years bin Laden hibernated in Sudan, where he kept his little army—paid well by his great fortune from his family’s assets—engaged in various forms of failed business enterprises, prayer, and bootcamp-style training. Typical of bin Laden, he could not formulate a mission or plan without another individual to inspire him.

In 1992 his close friend and Imam Abu Hajer performed the role of instigator. He and bin Laden, persuaded that American power and influence were moving into the area, not only in a military base in Saudi Arabia, but using the excuse of the famine in Somalia to occupy the Horn of Africa. Now it seemed to them that America was expanding its influence into the whole Islamic region.

At the end of 1992, they discussed the threat of the expanding U.S. presence, and saw that America was the locus of Christianity—not the increasingly secularized Europe—especially the evangelizing American kind. Says Wright, “Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy. To them the Crusades were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam. They bitterly perceived the contradiction embodied by Islam’s long, steady retreat from the gates of Vienna, where on September 11—that now resonant date—in 1683, the king of Poland began the battle that turned back the farthest advance of the Muslim armies.”

It was on Abu Hajer’s authority that Al-Qaeda was permanently transformed from the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into an international terrorist organization with America as its target. Now “Al-qaeda would concentrate not on fighting armies but on killing civilians,” according to the principle of takfir.

The Quran explicitly states that Muslims shall not kill anyone, except as punishment for murder.The killing of Muslims is an even greater offense. Sayyid Qutb, the philosopher of modern Arabic terrorism, found a way around these Quranic strictures. He asserted that a leader who does not impose sharia law on the country must be an apostate. This is based on a well-known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity (of the wife), or for turning away from Islam. It was only a step or two to extending the principle of takfir to apply to any modern behavior. And this is what the new radical Islamists have done. Explains Wright, “The new takfiris…extended the death warrant to encompass, for instance, anyone who registered to vote. Democracy, in their view, was against Islam because it placed in the hands of people authority that properly belonged to God. Therefore, anyone who voted was an apostate, and his life was forfeit….The new takfiris believed that they were entitled to kill practically anyone and everyone who stood in their way; indeed, they saw as a divine duty.”

Thus, the bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya in 1998, the first terrorist attack unambiguously attributable to Al-Qaeda, which killed and maimed mostly Africans and Muslims and which was greeted by horror by Muslims all over the world, was only the first in Al-Qaeda’s terror agenda. It was quickly followed by the Khobar Towers blast in Saudi Arabia, and then the even bolder attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000.

Wright’s discussion of how Al-Qaeda actually accomplished the 9/11 attack is disappointing. Perhaps we will never know the operational details. But we do know a few things. We know that although it was not bin Laden’s idea to use planes as missiles, he did actually believe that America could be destroyed by bombs in select places. In one of his sermons he is quoted as saying, “America is a great power….but all this is built upon an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to obvious weak spots. If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership.”

We know too that among all of the supposed vast army of recruits Khaled Sheik Mohammed, the operational commander of the 9/11 attack, had to choose from, he could find only four familiar enough with the language and ways of America to lead the four hijackings. These four were the best they could find, and even these seemed, where it came to competence and common sense, to be hanging on by their fingertips. The most famous one, Mohammed Atta, grim, dark eyed, unsmiling, “constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. His last will states that: ‘No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.’ The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.”

Wright has much to say about the fractured intelligence system that made it possible for 9/11 to occur. The basic story is well known; he only excites our rage with details. It is clear that had the intelligence services cooperated in the investigations prior to 9/11 there is a good possibility that 9/11 could have been prevented. No doubt the audacity of the scheme and the element of surprise were largely effective in its success. But so many things could have gone wrong for these ignorant, barely competent young Arabs—a hundred things—and the nineteen were not great geniuses or great warriors. But they were very, very, lucky in three of the four planes. All it needed was a sharp intelligence service that could have cooperated to find or create more errors among the anxious terrorists.

Right after 9/11, when we ordinary citizens first began to hear of bin Laden, he came as a package wrapped in considerable mystique, making him into something with magical attributes and formidable beyond our powers to contain him. And although Wright can give us little insight into the way bin Laden’s mind works, it is possible to speculate along certain lines based on some facts, sketchy as they may be, about what bin Laden’s strengths and especially what his weaknesses may be.

Among one of his greatest strengths as a leader in the radical Islamic movement is his mythical reputation, developed during the Soviet-Afghan war when he brought a small Arab army with him to fight against the “infidels.” He came with much money and supplied his men with equipment, religious support, and inspiration. And even though he was not considered an important or valued ally by the Afghani mujahedeen who actually prosecuted the war against the Soviets, bin Laden created for himself and his little army a myth that he had been instrumental in defeating the Russians. This myth was perpetuated and spread in the Arab world.

Part of the strength of his mystique and the myth of his power had to do with his access to vast amounts of wealth—at first supplied by his family’s wealth, but lately from other unknown sources. If you can pay and equip hundreds of men from impoverished families then you do have real power, at least for as long as you pay them. For a period of time when he was disowned by his family and his access to that wealth was removed, many of his “loyal” followers disappeared in search of other forms of income.

In addition to his access to vast amounts of money, he apparently has contacts in the Arab world who continue to believe in his mission and his leadership. At least among those who welcome the rise of radical Islamism, he appears to be still a player.

Certain other personal characteristics play a part in his ability to hold power over his followers. He has a large and imposing physical presence which always plays a part in casting a psychological spell over people. He tends to speak ex cathedra, as though he had some legitimate power, and knowledge that he has special access to. This kind of charismatic quality can be very effective with unsophisticated and unempowered followers.

Among the weaknesses which bin Laden may have and of which we may be fortunate beneficiaries in the future is his serious tendency to deny reality in making judgments about his mission to destroy America and the West. He imagines that his views of America are true, and that as long as he believes them his plans will come to pass. He is a visionary, a dreamer who takes his dreams as messengers of truth. He has lost millions of dollars in projects that were unrealistic or in which he failed to acknowledge their complexity. And he has very grandiose fantasies about his own place and power in the world, and is a poor judge of people whom he delegates to carry out his grandiose missions.

It is probably not an accident that America has not been victimized again since the attack in 2001. We could have been victims of a thousand individual suicidal bombers wearing explosive belts like those there have been in Israel and even London. But it would be highly unlikely that bin Laden—leader of the only terror group that would seriously target the U.S.—would authorize a piddling, unimportant attack in his name. It would have to be big time and iconic, something even the Arab street would hear about—something sufficiently aggrandizing for him to be satisfied and not humiliated by. It would not be enough to blow up a bar mitzvah at the Carlyle, even if it killed a hundred people. But a “dirty bomb” attack in front of the Empire State Building which killed only 6 people and messed up the local streets with low-level radiation that required weeks to clean up would be acceptable to bin Laden because it could be spun by the Arab press into something grand—“Atomic Bomb Explodes at Empire State Building—Al Qaeda claims responsibility.” That’s more like it.

Bin Laden and his minions have been very, very lucky; we have been asleep, and our defenders have been at war with each other. Now that we are awake, more assertive and unified, let us see whether they’re so lucky.

PS

After finishing writing the above, I attended a performance in an off-off-Broadway theater (Culture Project) of author Lawrence Wright’s one-man “play”titled “My Trip to Al-Quaeda.” It was something of a surprise.

Soft-spoken, informally dressed, and seemingly as objective in tone as his book, Wright appeared on a near-bare stage occupied only by a desk, a bulletin board, and a screen on which photographs and film clips illustrating his talk were projected. Toward the end of his performance, if such it was, he seemed to lose the objectivity that characterized his impressive feat of history/reportage in “The Looming Tower” and offer some narrative tidbits that his New York downtown avant-garde audience ate up. An earlier silence was broken by laughter and occasional applause as he referred to being questioned by a couple of FBI agents he made sound like buffoons (they asked if he knew Caroline Wright. Of course, she was his daughter, and was not a terrorist despite having gone to school with Jenna Bush); showed pictures of naked prisoners at Abu Gharib being confronted by dogs (as though this were the common treatment of prisoners rather then an anomaly, compared, say, to the lives of detainees at Guantanamo, probably the most comfortable, if not the most pampered existence they have ever known); showed excerpts from his 1998 movie “The Seige” in which Denzel Washington makes an impassioned plea for refraining from actions that would make us Americans just like our enemies—in which case, what are we fighting for?). At the end, Wright repeats the exhortation of his screenplay hero. In our humiliation of others we are becoming like them. We must guard against becoming them. Not, one might suggest, the kind of thinking that would enable us to defeat those who would, as they make perfectly clear in much of what he has quoted and illustrated, destroy us. In the last few minutes of his presentation, Wright has segued from being a reporter we can trust to being another spokesman for the “savvy” (Culture Project’s founder’s word) intellectual left embodied by his New Yorker colleagues and editor and his theatrical director. It is probably hard to resist being taken to the bosom of such eloquent voices of the bien-pesant. Too bad.