The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda And The Road To 9/11 – Lawrence Wright, 2006 ★★★½

Countdown to Ground Zero

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.”

Osama bin-Laden loved the desert. He walked barefoot on burning sands and left the air-conditioner in his home off whenever possible. Living in a cave was no hardship. Image from https://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135905649/bin-laden-from-millionaires-son-to-most-wanted.

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.”

The assassination of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat in Cairo on October 6, 1981, an early blow in the rise of Islamic terrorism. One of al-Qaeda's principal founders, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was arrested in a round-up of suspected conspirators. Photo by Makaram Gad Alkareem from http://www.nbcnews.com/id/43640995/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/sadats-assassination-plotter-remains-unrepentant/#.Xm00G6hKi70

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 awaiting his final trial in 1966. "We read Sayyid Qutb," one bin Laden associate recalls in The Looming Tower. "He was the one who most affected our generation." Image from http://sunnionline.us/english/2015/10/31/5009/.

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.

Another voice for anti-West terror was Iranian ruler Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who Wright quotes: “You, who want freedom, freedom for everything, the freedom of parties, you who want all the freedoms, you intellectuals: freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag out nation to the bottom.” Photo by Stig Nillson for AFP from https://www.timesofisrael.com/khomeinis-legacy-looms-over-iran-30-years-after-his-death/. 

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.

The October 2000 suicide bombing on the USS Cole claimed the lives of 17 American sailors and was al-Qaeda's first major blow against the West. It was supposed to be videotaped, but according to Wright the cameraman overslept. Image from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/al-qaeda-militant-tied-deadly-uss-cole-bombing-believed-killed-n954916. 

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.”

One strange sidebar Wright focuses on is the story of Mohammad Omar, head of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and a protector of bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. According to Wright, he first agreed to hand bin Laden to the Saudis, then changed his mind. "You should put your hand in ours and his, and fight against the infidels," he told them. Driven from power, he died in 2013. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Omar.

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.

Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Wright has since produced a sequel book of sorts, The Terror Years, tracking the rise of ISIS, among other titles. In 2018 The Looming Tower was made into an Emmy-winning miniseries. Photo by Kenny Braun from https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/lawrence-wright.

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.

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.