We tend to overrate and then underrate real-life monsters. We build them up to hulking status when they still threaten us, only to shrug them off once they are safely gone.
Osama
bin Laden was for a time Bondian in his supervillainy. Today it’s tempting to
see him as a one-hit wonder with no second act. Before 9/11 he directed a
bloody attack on the USS Cole, but after his final, biggest play he
accomplished little else other than being tough to kill.
Even
before his death in 2011, bin Laden was described as less than formidable by many,
including author Lawrence Wright, whose bin Laden-centered history The
Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda And The Road To 9/11 won the Pulitzer Prize for
General Non-Fiction in 2007.
According
to Wright, not even friends were impressed with the guy. Take the son of a
Sudanese leader who lived near bin Laden for a while:
“There
was no hypocrisy in his character. No divergence between what he says and what
he does. Unfortunately, his IQ was not that great.”
Two
things made bin Laden stand out: his single-minded zeal for Wahhabism, a stern branch
of Islam that often attracts violent Muslims; and his place as a heir to one of
Saudi Arabia’s richest families, the bin Ladens, a major contractor behind the
country’s oil boom.
Yet
bin Laden comes across in The Looming Tower as not all that much. He had
an apocalyptic vision and money, but ultimately was more pawn than king. The
grinning puppetmaster who portioned out death to eager subordinates and rallied
millions against the West had others pulling his own strings, like the Egyptian
Ayman al-Zawahiri, who joined a weakened al-Qaeda and redirected it while bin
Laden looked on.
Just
what drove these men? If there is one message Wright wants to impart, it is
simply this: Don’t blame Islam.
Muhammad,
Wright says, was no bloodthirsty butcher; the truth was more complicated. In
both the Koran and in a collection of sayings known as the hadith, injunctions
against murder appear often. Bin Laden and the radicals who inspired him
twisted the words to suit violent ends. In some cases, they “reversed the
language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder.”
It
was the culture, not the religion, that produced bin Laden:
Radicalism
usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining
opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and
bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment – movies, theater,
music – is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from
the consoling and socializing presence of women.
Frustrated
sexual passion plays a role, according to Wright. In his book, Wright examines
key players leading up to bin Laden, and draws upon their obsessive hatred of
women, particularly sexually active ones they encounter in the West.
Our
first example of this is Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian radical who burned over the
secularization of his homeland but really came unglued during a trip to the
United States.
Qutb
wrote about an encounter he had on a ship bound for New York. A woman knocked
at his stateroom door, “half-naked” as he described her. After sending him
away, he became even more committed to his angry beliefs, later writing:
“A
girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped
mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside
her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh,
only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”
A
lot of burning bodies would follow, of course, though Qutb himself was out of
the picture by 1966, hung by the Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdul Nasser for his
part in an assassination plot. Qutb’s visions would come true by inspiring bin
Laden and others.
Bin
Laden’s mission always seemed hazy, however clear the results. He started his
radical turn in the 1980s fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, though not, as
Wright notes, with notable effectiveness. Afghan warriors
viewed him and other “Arab Afghans” as inept interlopers, too hung up on
personal martyrdom to make a difference.
Bin
Laden spent a lot of money on his Afghan adventure, running through much of his
personal fortune, which though vast was not limitless. His family was rich,
yes, but his place in the bin Laden clan was shaky at best. Even his own mother
found his radicalism off-putting. When he started making the wrong enemies, the
patience of the Saudi ruling class quickly evaporated.
When
the United States and our allies sent forces to protect Saudi Arabia against a
secularist foe, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, bin Laden went off the deep end.
Non-believers taking defensive positions in the Arabian peninsula, however far
from the Islamic holy centers of Mecca and Medina, was the final straw that
marked them as the ultimate enemy.
Before
that, bin Laden pleaded with Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, not to
let the Americans into their country:
“You
don’t need Americans. You don’t need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be
enough.”
“There
are no caves in Kuwait,” the prince observed. “What will you do when he lobs
missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?”
“We
will fight him with faith,” bin Laden responded.
Ultimately,
the coalition did their job, but in staying so long past the ceasefire, America
became bin Laden’s target as he formed his ragtag assemblage of disaffected
radicals into a dangerous fighting force.
What
made bin Laden so successful with much of the Arab world? It goes back to the
culture clash, Wright explains:
By
declaring war on the United States from a cave in Afghanistan, bin Laden
assumed the role of an uncorrupted, indomitable primitive standing against the
awesome power of the secular, scientific, technological Goliath; he was
fighting modernity itself.
There
was a sexual dynamic, too. Bin Laden had four wives at a time and a posse of
children, but he railed against Western morals and their corrosive effect. Even
something as simple as a song could set him off. “Music is the flute of the
devil,” he proclaimed.
Eventually
this attitude cost him defectors, including at least one of his wives. By then,
bin Laden was too far gone to care. Al-Qaeda itself had fallen apart and
reformed many times, so radicalized “that it was almost impossible to tell the
philosophers from the sociopaths.”
Wright
takes a two-prong approach with his narrative, simultaneously spotlighting bin
Laden and his associates as well as members of American law enforcement whose
duty was to stop him. The bin Laden story is riveting; the American part of the
book less so.
Much
of the American story centers on high-ranking FBI agent John O’Neill, who focused
early on the threat on bin Laden only to fall from favor soon after al-Qaeda
struck the Cole in 2000. He was then hired by the World Trade Center,
where he died on September 11.
Bin
Laden had wives; O’Neill had mistresses. Both were fanatics in their own ways,
highly skilled yet socially inept. Wright calls them “well-matched opponents.” But
the comparison is not deep, and the longer Wright spends on O’Neill, the less
compelling his narrative becomes.
An
analysis of what went wrong from an American intelligence perspective in the
run-up to 9/11 would be interesting, but Wright defers too much to sources like
counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke to make any points that stick. Too much bureaucratic
infighting and not enough intelligence-sharing is Wright’s overall verdict, a
conclusion that must have been more provoking in 2007 than it reads now.
Some
criticism of The Looming Tower has centered on the fact there’s not much
9/11 in it: the jetliners don’t hit their targets until page 356 of the 387-page
narrative. But Wright’s focus is not on consequences but causes; he does a fine
job explaining how al-Qaeda came to be.
Mostly
he develops a compelling portrait of bin Laden as a man at war with himself
before taking on the world at large:
Throughout his life, he would hunger for austerity like a vice: the desert, the cave, and his as yet unspoken desire to die anonymously in a trench in warfare. But it was difficult to hold on to this self-conception while being chauffeured around the Kingdom in the family Mercedes.
Throughout his life, he would hunger for austerity like a vice: the desert, the cave, and his as yet unspoken desire to die anonymously in a trench in warfare. But it was difficult to hold on to this self-conception while being chauffeured around the Kingdom in the family Mercedes.
There
are no easy answers in the end, just piercing questions, which Wright lays out
in a compelling, crystalline fashion. He puts 9/11 in perspective, not an easy
thing to do, by showing bin Laden’s antecedents in the last century and
revealing the organization’s weaknesses as well as its strengths.
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