Through Our Enemies' Eyes

by Michael Scheuer

  While the ideological, political, and theological foundations of the two declarations are worlds apart, each comes to the same conclusion: arms must be used against the established rulers and their supporters, because, as Patrick Henry said, “There is no retreat but in submission and slavery.”28 After describing the patient attempts to persuade the al-Sauds to reform, bin Laden wrote in the crossing-the-Rubicon tone of Brown, Henry, and Jefferson. Armed action was mandatory, bin Laden wrote, because “all peaceful means to expel foreign occupation and reverse the process of de-Islamization in Saudi Arabia have been exhausted by opposition groups,” implicitly echoing John Brown’s realization that he had “vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it [the end of legal slavery] might be done.”29

  Because the al-Sauds had “violated legitimate rights” of their subjects, bin Laden wrote that he and his fellow reformers had

  offered advice secretly and openly, in verse and in prose, singly and in groups, and they sent petition after petition, and memorandum after memorandum. They left no stone unturned and there was no influential person they did not include in the reformist moves. In their writings they applied the gentle and lenient method of wisdom and good advice calling for reform and penance for the major wrongdoings and corruption that transgressed the categorical religious limits and the public’s legitimate rights.

  More regrettably, however, the only response they got from the regime was rejection, disregard, and ridicule. The matter did not stop at the point of just humiliating them [the reformers] but that was followed by greater and greater misdeeds throughout the land of the two holy mosques. Therefore silence was no longer appropriate and overlooking the facts was no longer acceptable.

  When excesses intensified and went beyond the limits of simple wrongdoings and misdeeds to violation of the clear basis of Islam, a group of ulema and religious scholars grew tired of the deafening sound of misguidance and injustice and the suffocating smell of corruption…. The submitted petitions and memoranda to the King urging reform … but he ignored the advice and ridiculed those who offered it, and the situation got worse.

  Those who offered advice then send more memoranda and petitions, the most important being the advice memorandum handed to the King in the month of Muharram 1413 Hegira [corresponding to 1992] which diagnosed the disease and prescribed the medicine with a sound Shari’ah approach and in a sound and scientific way. It dwelt on the main gaps in the regime’s philosophy and the main anomalies in the regime’s foundations…. It also dwelt on the country’s laws and regulations and what they allowed and disallowed against God’s will.

  Although the memorandum submitted all that leniently and gently, as a reminder of God and as good advice in a gentle, objective, and sincere way, [and] despite the importance and necessity of advice for rulers in Islam, and despite the number and positions of the signatories of the memorandum, it was to no avail. Its contents were rejected and its signatories and sympathizers were humiliated, punished, and imprisoned.

  The preachers’ and reformers’ eagerness to pursue peaceful reform methods in the interest of the country’s unity and to prevent bloodshed was clearly demonstrated. So why should the regime block all means of peaceful reform and drive the people toward armed action? That was the only door left open for the public for ending injustice and upholding right and justice.30

  Thus, bin Laden and his reformer colleagues laid claim to the right asserted by Jefferson, Henry, Paine, and their colleagues after they had exhausted all avenues of peaceful remonstrance; “it is their Right, it is their Duty to throw off such a government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”

  I believe that the decision to move from petition to arms deserves no less respectful consideration—if America is to be protected—than that of the American patriots we rightly revere. Unfortunately, America and the West today hear bin Laden and his colleagues with a predisposition identical to that with which the British Crown heard the founders; that is, in Professor Esposito’s words, “by the tendency in the international system to regard those in power as legitimate rulers or governments, regardless of how they came to power or whether they are autocratic or repressive.”31

  This is not to say that bin Laden and his colleagues are correct and merit sympathy; as I have said, the United States will eventually have to use military force to confront and defeat bin Laden and the forces he is inciting. It is to say, however, that bin Laden is an honorable man and a worthy enemy, one who turned his energies to war only after years of peaceful, law-abiding agitation. Reflecting on the events before our revolution, Thomas Paine concluded that no honest man could condemn Americans for acting in haste. “I have as little superstition in me as any living man,” Paine wrote in The American Crisis,

  but my secret opinion has and still is that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction or leave them unsupported to perish who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war by every decent method that wisdom could invent. Neither have I so much of the infidel in me as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world and given us up to the care of devils, and as I do not, and can not, see on what grounds the King of Britain can look up to heaven for help against us; a common murderer, a highwayman, or a housebreaker has as good a pretense as he.32

  As matters turned out, Paine’s “secret opinion” was validated and the American incendiaries prevailed. Across centuries and cultures, who is to say with confidence that another well-led group of formerly patient and peaceful incendiaries could not again prevail?

  II

  ARROGANCE, MONEY, AND IDEAS

  2

  OBSTACLES TO UNDERSTANDING BIN LADEN

  Now, Faithful, play the man, speak for thy God;

  Fear not the Wicked’s malice, nor their rod;

  Speak boldly man, the truth is on thy side;

  Die for it, and to life in triumph ride.

  The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678

  It is commonplace to say each of us brings to the understanding of people, events, and ideas the biases formed by our upbringing, family, and education; our personal, religious, professional, and political experiences; and the degree to which we have accepted or rejected society’s norms and conventions. Each of us, therefore, views any particular person, idea, or event from a slightly different angle. In general, however, Americans currently seem to share several basic beliefs that differ markedly from those that have historically shaped American life, to wit: there are few if any absolutes; most people think as we do, share our values, admire us, and want to emulate us; wars can be fought and won with few or no casualties; foreigners benefit from U.S. foreign policy and should be grateful for our efforts; and there are issues about which it is wise not to talk for fear of being labeled as prejudice. Contemporary Americans also are impatient, quickly frustrated, and have short attention spans; they accept being told how and what to think by the media; often form views on first appearances; are deeply cynical about their own and foreign leaders; have marginal knowledge of their history and almost none of others; and have an aversion to risk, and a love of ease. Finally, a few historic American characteristics still factor into our national life: a focus on making a buck; an insular eagerness to get on with life and pursue personal and local interests; and a perfect willingness to let the world go its own way if the world will leave us alone.

  These attributes leave Americans singularly unprepared to really hear what Osama bin Laden has been saying; to understand why he said it; to recognize the sincerity and seriousness of purpose with which he spoke when declaring war on the United States; or, at least until the events of 11 September 2001, to appreciate the extent of the damage he intended to do to U.S. interests. Journalist John Miller caught this point exactly. “In modern day America,” he wrote in Esquire in February 1999, “we no longer have the stomach for endeavors that don’t seem like sure bets, which can make things tricky when you are up against someone who doe
sn’t give a damn, someone who is willing to risk everything. and gladly.” More troubling, U.S. leaders fear to remind citizens of the eternal truth that, as Professor Robin Fox has written, “war has been a constant in human history … [and] may very well have intrinsic self-rewarding qualities, and that these are easily appealed to, and the emotions associated with them easily aroused.”1 Since the cold war’s end, U.S. and Western leaders have said that war is obsolete, and that the world is now—under the rubric “Globalization”—marching toward an inevitable and worldwide liberal-democratic society.

  The pervasive belief in the inevitable triumph of Western liberalism is one of the main reasons for the self-righteous fury liberals focused on Samuel Huntington’s clash-of-civilization thesis. Having rejected Huntington, Western elites are now going through what Professor Fox has described as “one of those ‘war is dead’ periods that occasionally try to brighten up the otherwise uninterrupted march of human conflict.” The danger of such ahistorical thinking lies in the fact that it becomes “wishful thinking, which in turn becomes a refusal to admit that the basic premise may just be plain wrong.” And the premise is clearly wrong. War is here to stay as long as human beings walk the earth, notwithstanding what Mark Helprin has called the American elites’ “insatiable mania to dissemble.” “No one will state that the lion has not lain down with the lamb,” Helprin has argued. “No one will state that, if we do not take care, perhaps those now playing in our schoolyards or resting in their mothers’ laps will die in enormous numbers in a war that will seem to have no end.”2

  Let us now look at how the foregoing characteristics are not shared by Osama bin Laden and his associates, and how that fact gives them a decided advantage over their American enemies.

  Suppressed Debate

  Osama bin Laden is not constrained by America’s tenets of political correctness, which have had the impact of “outlawing generalizations about peoples and regions [and thereby] immobilizes meaningful discussions about them.”3 He has asserted without doubt, vagueness, or qualification the superiority of Islam and Islamic life and has described in detail his hatred for Jews and Christians because of their occupation of Islamic lands and sanctities, heretical beliefs or lack of religious belief, focus on money, and relentless persecution of Muslims. Because many Americans are silent on such touchy issues as race, religion, and sexual mores, so as not to offend, be labeled a bigot, or risk legal entanglements for violating the “hate speech” laws the Federal government uses to protect its policies from criticism, they tend to consign to the lunatic fringe those who publicly and forcefully articulate nonmainstream beliefs. In bin Laden’s case, this behavior could be fatal; bin Laden has been far from the lunatic fringe in the Muslim world, and his views and actions have an increasing following.

  What must be understood is that what bin Laden has said and done has everything to do with religion and that we will neither understand him nor the threat he has unleashed until we recognize and articulate that there are tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims who, like bin Laden, hate the United States for what they believe is its consistently anti-Islamic behavior. “Bin Laden has become a pan-Arab hero,” Egyptian Islamist lawyer Muntasir al-Zayyat has said, “because the Arab and Muslim peoples are yearning to [sic—for?] any voice that says no to the United States.” Bin Laden is attempting to repel what he views as Christian aggression, to end what he considers the West’s deliberate “humiliation” of the Islamic world, and to restore to Muslims their dignity and control over their destinies. In doing so, bin Laden’s supporters will kill, in God’s name, those they deem enemies of Islam, and will kill them with whatever means and in whatever numbers are necessary to achieve their goals.4

  When U.S. and other Western leaders describe bin Laden as a terrorist problem, not a religious issue, they mislead their publics. By doing so, they fail to teach their listeners that bin Laden is far more than a run-of-the-mill terrorist, that he is, rather, a multitalented Muslim leader who claims to be motivated by his love for God and his fellow Muslims and has acted in a manner he believes is prescribed by laws given by that God and explained and amplified by God’s messenger, the Prophet Muhammed. “This war is fundamentally religious,” bin Laden said in November 2001. “Under no circumstances should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For, the enmity is based on creed.”5

  These leaders are also misleading when they fail to explain that policies pursued by the United States and the West for decades in the Middle East and Muslim world generally are seen by many Muslims as anti-Islamic. For the little they pay attention to international affairs, Americans tend to believe U.S. foreign policy is benign and characterized by generosity, altruism, support for the underdog, concern for human rights, and advocacy of democracy. Americans are surprised when ungrateful foreigners try to knock down our airliners, blow up our skyscrapers, sink our ships, and kill our servicemen and drag their nude and mutilated bodies through the streets. To understand the perspective of the supporters of bin Laden, we must accept that there are many Muslims in the world who believe that U.S. foreign policy is irretrievably biased in favor of Israel; trigger happy in attacking the poor and ill-defended Muslim countries, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and so forth; rapacious in controlling and consuming the Islamic world’s energy resources; blasphemous in allowing Israel to occupy Jerusalem and U.S. troops to be based in Saudi Arabia; and hypocritical and cruel in its denial of Palestinian rights, use of economic sanctions against the Muslim people of Iraq, and support for the Muslim world’s absolutist kings and dictators. It matters not a lick if these perceptions hold water; they have been dogma for bin Laden, his followers, and tens of millions of Muslims around the world. Until that fact is accepted, America will not be able to defend itself. As the strategist Williamson Murray has written, America’s defense is not optimal, because its leaders are “wholly disconnected from what others, think, want, and can do” and refuse to accept that “[w]hat matters most in war is what is in the mind of one’s enemies, from command post to battlefield points-of-contact.”6

  Obsolete Experts

  Another problem for Americans as they try to comprehend what bin Laden is about is their tendency to accept the views of those the media term “experts.” These experts are usually of two types: retired government and military officials or “informed” commentators, the latter mostly journalists and academics. In many cases, this stable of experts is working from a database of experience and knowledge that was relevant in the 1970s or 1980s, when they were professionals working against “international terrorism.” The relatively small number of retired U.S. government officials among the experts the media roll out after a terrorist attack is composed mostly of individuals who labored against Lebanese Hizballah, the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and the phalanx of leftist groups that once bedeviled Western Europe. None of these groups ever posed a direct national security threat to America—with the possible exception of Hizballah, which last attacked a U.S. target in 1991—and none was more than a sporadically lethal nuisance to the United States. Today most of these groups have either ceased to exist, are internationally inactive, or have meandered into a geriatric limbo where neither their bark nor their bite is a particularly large worry.

  In any event, the experts’ detailed knowledge of these groups—as valuable as it was when they were in government service—is not transferable to the bin Laden problem. Bin Laden’s organization is larger, more ethnically diverse, more geographically dispersed, younger, richer, better educated, better led, and more militarily trained and combat experienced than the groups the experts faced. Most important, it also has more growth potential and is more religiously motivated than any organization mentioned above. Only Hizballah has remotely approached the religious intensity that is the signal characteristic of al Qaeda. The central motivating role of Islam in al Qaeda activities, then, is a factor largely absent from the milieu in wh
ich most media experts worked.

  The media experts are hamstrung in another way by their professional experience. When they were working, the experts confronted the peak years of activity by what the U.S. government identifies as the “State Sponsors of Terrorism,” a group now consisting of Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Libya, and Sudan. Many of the above-mentioned terrorist groups were, in the lingo of the day, “surrogates” for state sponsors. The two brands of terrorist entities existed in a symbiotic relationship believed to benefit both. The terrorist groups, for example, benefited from their state sponsor’s provision of money, training, explosives, weapons, logistical assistance, and identity and travel documents. At the same time, the state sponsor gained by having a terrorist group to do its lethal bidding. This arrangement gave the state sponsor what was called “plausible deniability” by allowing it to attack without using its intelligence service or special forces.

  This line of analysis was the standard and largely accurate assessment for the structure of Middle Eastern terrorism for most of the 1970s and 1980s, although the goofy concept of plausible deniability was operable only because of America’s obsession with securing court-quality evidence of culpability before retaliating, and the Europeans’ always-desperate eagerness to cling to any speck of doubt that might allow them to sidestep militarily retaliation against attacks on their interests. Overall, the importance of the state sponsors in the 1970s and 1980s gave the media experts a frame of reference in which the threat posed by a terrorist group was determined by its state sponsor’s strength and audacity. Certainly the groups never posed a meaningful threat to U.S. national security. Ergo, groups without state sponsors were thought not to pose much of a threat. The Hizballah-Iran pairing, of course, was the colossus that dominated the experts’ professional lives and today still dominates much of their analysis.