13
BIN LADEN STANDS AT ARMAGEDDON AND BATTLES FOR HIS LORD
They tell us, sir, that we are weak—unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed and when a British guard will be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak, if we make proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.
Patrick Henry, 1775
This chapter’s title is a play on Theodore Roosevelt’s speech accepting the 1912 presidential nomination at the Progressive Party’s “Bull Moose” convention in Chicago. It was chosen because there are ways in which bin Laden and TR are alike, an analogy planted in the author’s mind by a question ABC’s John Miller asked Osama bin Laden in May 1998.1 Bin Laden and Roosevelt clearly shared black-and-white moralistic views of human and world affairs, discerned the active presence of evil in the world, believed they knew God’s plan for how the world should work, were certain of what each individual’s moral responsibilities entail, and warned their brethren of the shame and dishonor that attach to individuals and nations when duties are shirked. This single-minded attitude in both men, moreover, proved to be accompanied by a subtle, patient, practical, and innovative mind. In the face of blatant evildoing, TR clearly believed that war was absolutely preferable to a cowardly evasion of responsibility for the sake of safety and ease. Bin Laden manifests exactly the same attitude. He, for example, gave up his family’s palatial estates and luxurious lifestyle for the Afghan deserts, caves, and mountains, risked his life in combat against the Soviets, and has preached an Islamist version of TR’s “Strenuous Life,” urging Muslims to struggle “by sacrificing their wealth and life as long as their holy places are not liberated from subjugation of Jews and Christians.”2
On this track, an unnamed former confident of bin Laden told the Associated Press after the 1998 East Africa bombing that “Osama sees the world in very simplistic terms, as a struggle between Muslims on one side, and on the other, Jews and Christians bent on oppressing them. He will not rest until either the United States leaves Saudi Arabia or he dies trying to make it happen.”3 Both bin Laden and TR also aspired to make their nations great, powerful, and, from their own perspective, good, and likewise both personally determined to stay, as TR said, in “the arena”—no matter how battered and bloody they became—until the goal was attained or they were dead. While TR urged Americans to “fear God and take your own part,” bin Laden can be said to be urging Muslims to “fear God and take God’s part.”
The two men, however, definitively part company in their respective approaches to war. TR always saw war in a somewhat idealized manner. Battles occurred between armies of trained men, prisoners of war were spared, civilians and property were respected and protected as much as possible, and the complete and arbitrary devastation of the enemy—military and civilian—was never the goal. TR, of course, died before the full reality of the Great War’s carnage hit American society, but even the combat death of his youngest son, Quentin, in France in 1918 appears not to have fully eliminated his idealization of war.4
Bin Laden and his followers, in contrast, are learned in the history of the Crusades—where the slaughter of captured soldiers and noncombatants by Catholic fighters and Muslim mujahedin was commonplace—and are the products of the century of total war, where civilians and economic infrastructure have not only been targets, but have also been primary targets. Bin Laden clearly believes the twentieth century was characterized by a steady return to barbarism, and, more precisely, barbarism refined, modernized, and practiced by the Christian West, and especially by the United States, against Muslims in a high-tech replay of the murderous practices used by Catholic armies during three-plus centuries of Crusades. “As we have said,” Bin Laden told journalist Jamal Ismail, “the recent events, whether the attack on Afghanistan or Sudan or Iraq … show that the law of the jungle, the law of cruise missiles from a distance by those cowards, is what governs the world today.” Bin Laden is loath to accept this reality. He has claimed that the United States is responsible for setting the standard for large-scale civilian casualties and that to protect Islam and Muslims he will fight fire with fire. “American history does not distinguish between civilian and military, not even women and children,” bin Laden told John Miller in 1998. “They [the Americans] are the ones who used [atomic] bombs against Nagasaki: Can these bombs distinguish between infants and military? America does not have a religion that will prevent it from destroying all people.”5
In 1999 bin Laden specifically addressed the issue of large-scale civilian casualties—or “collateral damage” in the shamefully obfuscating parlance that dominates Western discourse—when he was asked by Jeune Afrique if he was troubled by the number of civilians killed or wounded in the Nairobi embassy bombing. “Imagine it was my own children [who] were taken hostage,” bin Laden told the journal, “and that shielded by this human shield, Islam’s enemies started to massacre Muslims. I would not hesitate, I would kill the assassins even if to do that I had to kill my children with my own hands. So one evil will have avoided an even greater evil. Sometimes, alas, the death of innocents is unavoidable. Islam allows that.”6
Ironically, just as bin Laden is adopting a no-holds-barred style of warfare similar to that of American Civil War general William T. Sherman, the U.S. government is completing the abandonment of the Sherman model—even though America has never been defeated using that model—and is being consumed with a “zero-casualty” obsession that covers its own and enemy forces. The United States, the Christian Science Monitor has written, is becoming a “a paper tiger, one that bombs from long range, runs ineffective interventions, and invests heavily in fantastic but untested weapons systems.” As al Qaeda seeks tools with which to conduct a military campaign more searing than Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas, the Monitor notes, “U.S. officials are increasingly defining success by the [smallest possible] number of losses.” Amplifying this hamstringing approach to war, U.S. military commanders in the field are further shackled by their political leaders’ demands that they “also avoid excessive casualties to their adversaries’ civilian populations.”
As Pentagon planners strive to wage the casualty-free brand of war their political masters demand, they must defy reality and pretend that Sherman’s method of war is no longer needed, that putting large numbers of combat boots on the ground and devastating civilian populations and property need no longer occur. In this context, how foreign, politically incorrect, and fear-producing would be the commonsense letter Sherman sent to General George H. Thomas—another great American master of war—just before the former left Atlanta with 65,000 sets of boot bound for Savannah and the sea. “I propose to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South,” Sherman wrote, “and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous…. We are not only fighting hostile armies, but hostile peoples, and most make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” Sherman and Thomas understood this eternal truth, but their military descendants would blanche and cower if it was now spoken. For Americans, unfortunately, bin Laden and his military commander Mohammad Atef accept the reality and promise of Sherman’s war-making method and will use it to make Americans “feel the hard hand of war.”7
Adding to the irony, most Western commentators have not noted that America’s military response to bin Laden closely resembles the attacks Western leaders term cowardly when used against Western interests. After al Qaeda’s 1998 East Africa attacks, in which the group had fighters killed, wounded, and captured, the editors of the Economist dusted off the West’s traditional bromide about terrorism. “However frequently it occurs,” the esteemed journal prattled, “terrorism does not l
ose its ability to shock. Nor should it. It remains one of the most despicable of crimes, both because the killing and wounding of innocents is central to its purpose, and because its perpetrators can so easily do their work without having to confront their enemies before slinking off to safety.” Given the self-sacrifice of al Qaeda’s fighters, it is hard to see the engagements in Kenya and Tanzania as other than face-to-face confrontations, especially after al Qaeda’s claim of responsibility immediately after the attack. The U.S. response to the attacks, however, more nearly approximates the Economist’s definition of “despicable” actions: a surprise attack with nearly eighty unmanned cruise missiles. This sort of hypocrisy has not been missed in the Muslim world. “[T]he Americans,” the militant Egyptian propagandist Yasir al-Sirri mocked in 1999, “are always fighting from behind a wall or with long-range missiles out of concern for their sons, while the faithful do not fear death but seek it.”8
It is in this context that bin Laden, between 1996 and 2001, incrementally increased the violence of his rhetoric and the destructiveness of his attacks on the United States. This six-year period saw bin Laden, his allies, and his associates score significant military victories, which in turn led to increased popularity for bin Laden and his cause in the Muslim world. At the same time, however, bin Laden’s forces have endured an unprecedented series of defeats. Indeed, the number of blows he and his colleagues successfully have absorbed since 1996 should give pause to those who believe the strength, reach, and popularity of his organization have been exaggerated.
Of this ilk, for example, U.S. News & World Report remarked in late 1998 that bin Laden’s al Qaeda “has been described in news accounts as an all-powerful, globe-spanning conspiracy worthy of a Tom Clancy thriller.” The magazine concluded that the speed with which several of bin Laden’s fighters were caught after the August 1998 attacks in East Africa “indicates that al Qaeda is not all it’s cracked up to be,” and quoted the U.S. Secret Service’s former chief of counterterrorism as saying that “in the case of al Qaeda, the tradecraft is not there, they don’t have the support of a patron state’s intelligence service.”9 But what was it if not superb tradecraft that allowed bin Laden to destroy two U.S. embassies 450 miles apart on the same day and at almost precisely the same moment—or, for that matter, the quantum growth in operational capability displayed in the near-simultaneous hijacking of four airliners and the ability to get three of the four to their targets? Lebanese Hizballah has never staged an attack that could even serve as the amateur opening act for these two al Qaeda operations, although most terrorism “experts” still are purveyors of the old-think mantra that a terrorist is only a serious threat to U.S. interests if he has a state sponsor, and, therefore, Iran-backed Hizballah is the only terrorist group to fear.10 This, of course, ignores the fact that Hizballah has not attacked U.S. interests since 1991, and that bin Laden is waging an insurgency, not a terrorist campaign. Indeed, as Professor Magnus Ranstorp has said, “in the face of conventionally stronger enemies, bin Laden urges offensive guerrilla warfare (terrorism), for he and other Islamic activists appreciate that neither the U.S. nor Israel can politically afford high levels of military casualties, as previous events in Beirut, Somalia, and southern Lebanon have demonstrated.”11
Events in bin Laden vs. Crusaders War 1996–2005
The following paragraphs sketch events in the “Bin Laden vs. Crusaders” war between May 1996 and 2005; as noted in the listing for the 1991–1996 period, the give-and-take of this war does not lend itself to a strict chronology.
In this revised edition, we have updated—for the reader’s convenience—this chronology to cover the ongoing war through 1 October 2005. In the section dealing with al Qaeda’s “victories,” attacks are described that yielded dead and gutted tourists, demolished embassies, and ongoing—indeed, strengthening—Islamic insurgencies around the world. Western media and governments bemoan these attacks as “terrorism,” and in this they are mistaken. Al Qaeda’s victories, and those of its allies and supporters, are acts of war aimed at strategic objectives, motivated by faith, and conducted in a manner appropriate to the attackers’ skills and resources. It is an arrogant and dangerous delusion to continue attaching the term “terrorism” to these events, because the term clouds the fact that much of the Muslim world deems itself under attack by U.S. foreign policy. These conscious acts of war will increase in lethality as skill levels rise and more sophisticated and deadly tools come to hand. Like the rose, war by any other name is still war.
• 25 June 1996: A truck loaded with explosives was detonated outside the U.S. military’s Khubar Towers housing facility near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen Americans and wounding some five hundred persons. While there appears to be no definitive proof of bin Laden’s culpability, Saudi interior minister Prince Nayif has said that “individuals motivated by bin Laden could have conducted the attack.” Abd al-Bari Atwan of Al-Quds Al-Arabi has written that, in his interview with bin Laden, the latter spoke of the attacks on Khubar Towers and Office of Program Management-Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM-SANG) and “expressed unusual sympathy with those who carried out the attack. He was very close to saying that they were from his supporters. He was close but did not say this. You sense pride in his eyes, that these real men, as he told me, were capable of implementing these two successful operations.” Bin Laden said in late 1996 that “what happened in the Riyadh [OPM-SANG, November 1995] and al-Khubar blasts was praiseworthy terrorism because it was against thieves, not individuals but major states which went there [Saudi Arabia] to plunder the riches of the nation and to encroach on its greatest holy sites.” He said the attacks were successful because they were “why the United States had to decide to reduce its forces in Saudi Arabia.”12
• 18 September 1997: Gama’at al-Islamiyah (IG) fighters attacked a tour bus in front of a Cairo museum, killing nine German tourists and one Egyptian.13
• 17 November 1997: In the Gama’at’s most lethal attack, its fighters killed fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians and wounded twenty-six other tourists at the Hatshepsut Temple near Luxor, Egypt. The IG attackers left leaflets—some carefully placed in the victim’s gutted bodies—calling for the release of Gama’at spiritual leader Shaykh Rahman from his U.S. prison and saying they had intended to take hostages at Luxor to trade for the shaykh. Eyewitnesses reported, however, that the attackers took their time and systematically executed their victims. In June 2000, Gama’at military chief Rifa’i Taha told Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that the Luxor attackers were “a group inside the IG that was tasked with such actions … the Luxor incident was the IG’s attempt to free its leaders, foremost of them Umar Abd-al-Rahman, Engineer Karam Zuhdi, Lieutenant Abbud al-Zummar and others.” The attack severely damaged Egypt’s tourist industry, one of its top foreign-exchange earners.14
• 22 December 1997: Led by bin Laden associate Ibn Khattab, a mixed Chechen–Arab Afghan force staged a nighttime raid on the cantonment of the Russian army’s 136th Mechanized Brigade General Command about one hundred kilometers inside Russian territory. Dozens of military vehicles—tanks, trucks, and armored personnel carriers—were destroyed and some Russian servicemen were killed. A senior Afghan Arab, the Egyptian Abu Bakr Qaidah, was killed in the raid. As the insurgents withdrew to Chechnya, they lured pursuing Russian forces into an ambush where the Russians suffered more casualties and vehicle losses.15
• February 1998: A member of India’s government said bin Laden “is responsible for the long night of explosions that shook Indian cities on the eve of legislative elections on 14 February 1998, resulting in more than 60 killed.” The U.S. government noted that fifty people were killed and more than two hundred wounded, but it did not attribute the attacks to bin Laden.16
• 7 August 1998: Bin Laden’s fighters attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with car bombs within minutes of each other; 12 Americans died and 7 were wounded; 291 Africans were killed and nearly 5,100 we
re wounded. Bin Laden praised the attackers “who risked their lives to earn the pleasure of God, Praise and Glory be to Him,” describing them as “real men, the true personification of the word men. They managed to rid the Islamic nation of disgrace. We highly respect them and hold them in the highest esteem.” In late 2000 Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) fighter Ali Mohammed told a U.S. court he had surveilled and photographed the U.S. embassy in Nairobi at bin Laden’s direction and that later “bin Laden looked at the picture of the American embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.”17
• 16 December 1998: The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) bombed a shopping mall in Zamboanga, Philippines, wounding sixty Christians who were Christmas shopping.18
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 31
