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September
25, 2001
The Meaning of
Osama bin Laden
The
practical question is not whether he's guilty, but what the U.S.
can-and cannot-hope to accomplish by hunting him down.
By Steve Perry
Was it really bin Laden? The question
is moot. The U.S. needs a face to put on the enemy as it prepares
to retaliate for the suicide bombings of September 11, and he's
our man. The Bush administration announced late Sunday that it
would soon release a briefing paper summing up the case against
bin Laden. If his resume is any guide, the case will be circumstantial
and inconclusive, a catalog of first- or second-hand ties to
the suicide bombers and their associates. Chances are it won't
really prove much, but the U.S. hopes at minimum that it will
offer moderate pro-Western governments in the region a plausible
pretext for supporting, at least passively, U.S. efforts to wipe
out bin Laden and his closest colleagues.
There's no doubt bin Laden
is a pivotal figure in the broad, loosely affiliated network
of radical Islamic guerrilla bands now operating not only in
the Middle East but around the world, from the Phillipines to-as
we have so forcefully learned over the past two weeks-the United
States itself. But is he a mastermind and direct financier of
terror operations, or mainly an inspirational figure? No one
knows for sure. Just how integrally involved he has been in past
assaults on U.S. interests remains a murky question. To see why,
and to understand what the U.S. now finds itself up against,
one has to consider the rise of bin Laden and the groups to which
he is tied.
The bin Laden saga commenced
with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Bin Laden's
native Saudi Arabia was among the first and most avid backers
of the Afghan resistance fighters; one of the forms its support
took involved the large-scale infusion of cash and expertise
by the best and brightest sons of the Saudis. Bin Laden, then
in his early twenties, went to Afghanistan and quickly made a
name for himself. Drawing on the resources of his family's construction
firm, he built roads, supply depots, and medical facilities for
the Afghans. Tales of his generous support to the families of
the wounded and killed became legend. Bin Laden was also an instrumental
figure in raising funds for the Afghan war effort. By the estimate
of one CIA official interviewed in a BBC documentary, the sums
he helped raise ran to $20-25 million a year.
The efforts of bin Laden and
friends were abetted mightily by the U.S. government, which,
through the CIA, funneled enormous amounts of aid to the Afghans.
The American stake in the war was a cynical one; the Carter administration
saw it as an opportunity to embroil the Soviet Union in "its
own Vietnam," in the words of national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski. It isn't clear whether the CIA worked directly
with bin Laden, but the point is academic. In coming to the aid
of the resistance, it helped forge the backbone of al-Qaeda and
organizations like it.
By the time the Soviets withdrew
in defeat ten years later, bin Laden was a budding icon among
the newly invigorated forces of Islamic resistance. And his stature
only grew in the subsequent decade following strikes at U.S.
forces and facilities in Somalia, Kosovo, Kenya and Tanzania,
and the U.S.S. Cole. There is no analogous figure in the recent
history of the West; to members of al-Qaeda and their brethren,
he is Elvis, Che Guevara, and the Rockefeller Foundation rolled
into one.
But a myth such as bin Laden's
is bound to obscure more than it reveals. Start with the matter
of his role as financier in the Afghan war. Even the most lavish
estimates of his personal fortune place it in the $250 million
range. He could not have supplied $20-25 million a year on his
own without exhausting the bulk of it. He was a fundraiser, and
there was apparently no shortage of wealthy, like-minded souls
willing to answer the call. There is every reason to expect this
is more true now than ever, following the Gulf War and a decade
of periodic U.S. missile assaults in places like Iraq and the
Sudan. Americans who would like to believe that killing bin Laden
or freezing his assets would deal a crippling blow to the finances
of al-Qaeda and others are simply kidding themselves.
The same goes for bin Laden's
putative "control" of these operations. To listen to
the public fulminations of American officials, you would suppose
that bin Laden sits at the head of a board of terrorists, calling
shots. Against this image, consider the words of the Robert Fisk,
the British writer who probably knows bin Laden and his world
better than any other English-speaking journalist. "Is he
capable of it?" Fisk asked himself in talking to a Radio
New Zealand interviewer last week. "Look, I'll give you
one tiny example. The second time I met him in Afghanistan, four
years ago he walked into the tent I was sitting in and sat down
opposite me, cross-legged on the floor and noticed in the bag
I usually carry some Arabic-language newspapers. He seized upon
these and went to the corner of the tent with a sputtering oil
lamp and devoured the contents.
"For 20 minutes he ignored
us, he ignored the gunman sitting in the tent, he ignored me.
He didn't even know, for example, that the Iranian foreign minister
had just visited Riyadh-his own country, Saudi Arabia (well,
until he lost his citizenship). So he seemed to me at the time
to be very isolated, a cut-off man, not the sort of person who
would press a button on a mobile phone and say, 'Put Plan B into
action.' So I don't think you can see this as a person who actually
participates in the sense of planning, step by step, what happens
in a nefarious attack."
You can't crush the gathering
Islamic revolt against the U.S. and the West more generally by
crushing bin Laden; you can only make a martyr who will draw
still more men and money to the cause. Privately American officials
know this, which is why they are careful to couch their move
against bin Laden as merely the first step in a long war. This
kind of rhetoric may be inevitable in the wake of events as terrible
as those in New York and Washington, but if the U.S. sticks to
this course for the long haul it will be a losing proposition:
There is no way to wipe out what is in the end a popular movement
for local sovereignty.
If the United States wants
to blunt the insurrectionary impulses reflected by al-Qaeda et
al, it can only do so by changing its policy in the Middle East.
That would mean, as a first step, moderating its support for
the Israelis and pushing them toward a more equitable co-existence
with the Palestinians; it would also mean a more flexible, variegated
policy toward the governments of the Middle East as they come
to terms with the oppositional elements inside their own countries.
Ultimately, too, it would involve finding means of reducing our
reliance on the oil reserves of that region. These are immense
changes, but they pale beside the prospect of waging endless
hot and cold wars against an Islamic resistance that will only
gain in size and determination with each new Western offensive.
Steve Perry writes frequently for CounterPunch
and is a contributor to the excellent cursor.org
website, which offers incisive coverage of the current crisis.
He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
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