SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (15 page)

When the Marine barracks were bombed in Lebanon, Osama bin Laden was a twenty-six-year-old college dropout. He watched as the United States folded its tents and went home, taking the French, British, and Italians with them. Osama’s religious studies and political beliefs had made him enthusiastically anti-Zionist, and increasingly anti-American. And to him the twin truck bombings in Beirut were a “David defeats Goliath” moment of glory. The innocents at Sabra and Shatila had been avenged, and the United States had been humbled.

Osama bin Laden drew the conclusion that martyrdom operations could defeat a superpower and force it to turn tail. It was a lesson he would never forget.

Though it was the Iranian government that planned and executed the Marine bombing, their local proxy, Hezbollah, took the credit. To Lebanese Shiites, and the victims of Sabra and Shatila, the bombings were the justice of God. Iran and Hezbollah created the narrative that America had killed Muslims at Sabra and Shatila, and that Islamic martyrs from Hezbollah had punished the Americans. The Iranians had won the battle of the narrative as well.

The Iranians, increasingly media savvy, made certain that Hezbollah was depicted as valiant, religious, and patriotic. This was classic fourth-generation warfare. Iran did not wish a direct military confrontation with the United States. They wished only to needle it.

Over the next two decades, the Iranians would pour arms, men, money, and weapons into Lebanon. Hezbollah would exert its muscle, eventually becoming the supreme military and political power in the nation. By 2011, Lebanon had become a near vassal state of Iran, no longer a failed nation, but a state taken over from within. The government in Beirut may not have been working, but Hezbollah was doing just fine. And wherever Hezbollah’s mullahs governed, the Iranians could claim to have successfully exported their Islamic revolution.

As a boy, Osama learned to read and write in Lebanon. And it was by watching war tear apart that beautiful, tragic nation that Osama thought he saw a way to force justice and peace upon the world.

THE MAKING OF A JIHADI

1979–1984

YOU CAN SUM UP THE
skewed geopolitical views shared by Osama bin Laden and members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the following way: American politicians walk a tightrope between the Christian religious right, which embraces Israel, and the Hollywood elite, who espouse Zionism for their own reasons. It is often claimed that Israel is America’s only friend in the Middle East; if that is true, it might be because Israel has made all the enemies that the United States could possibly accommodate. Starting with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the perception on the Arab street was that the United States was in the business of propping up Israel. The face the Israelis show to their neighbors is a catalog of American military hardware: Phantom jets, HueyCobras, Hellfire missiles, M-16 rifles—these weapons are emblematic of the United States. An examination of U.S. foreign aid between 1949 and 2007 could not persuade any thinking Arab to believe otherwise. Since the establishment of Israel, the U.S. government has given more than $100 billion to its Middle Eastern ally. This includes military grants totaling $55.6 billion, economic grants of nearly $31 billion, and almost $20 billon in miscellaneous programs. In Arab eyes, the United States arms and funds a thin-skinned and expansionist regional bully. Islamic radicals might only add that in addition to being a stooge of international Zionism, the United States is a godless, corrupt, warmongering, satanic parasite whose imperial pretenses are sucking dry the world’s resources, while murdering and enslaving the Muslim people.

While attending Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Osama read Sayyid Qutb’s
Signposts
and
In the Shade of the Koran
. He attended lectures by Mohammed Qutb, the martyred Jihadi’s brother. Osama would later credit both with sharpening his anti-Semitism, which was firmly based, he maintained, on Koranic principles. Osama bin Laden hated the nation of Israel, and he came also to hate the United States of America. He would wage a war of terror to set right what he saw as fundamental wrongs. But unlike Yasser Arafat and an entire generation of PLO terrorists, the mainspring of Osama’s violent designs had little to do with the establishment of a Palestinian homeland. His motivations were at first, and would always remain, religious. When Osama bin Laden took up the sword, he did so to propagate the faith of Islam. It was Osama’s belief that where Islam was established, justice and peace would follow.

In a country as secular as a United States, it seems unthinkable to murder people in the name of God. It is almost irresistible for Western intellectuals to invoke the doctrine of cultural relativism in regard to Islamic terrorism. We are predisposed to equate self-sacrifice with altruism. In Western culture, a captain goes down with his ship; the fireman risks his life to save others; a mother gives her life to protect her child. The Western mind is compelled to find in every act of Islamic self-murder some readily understandable motive, some root cause that is simple, pure, rational, and valid. Why are they sacrificing themselves? What is the higher purpose? And why are they targeting innocent people?

The answer is simple and terrifying: Islamic fundamentalists hate. And they hate profoundly. They hate Jews, and Christians, and Shiites and Buddhists. They hate women. What has been misnamed the “Global War on Terror” is actually a struggle not between Islam and Christianity, but between religious bigotry and Western secular liberalism.

It is inappropriate to measure Islamic violence with a yardstick notched with occidental ideas of altruism. To do so, to conceive that terrorist martyrs must be motivated toward some collective goal is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Islamic religious violence, and to misapprehend the process by which “martyrdom operations” are planned and carried out.

The views of Osama and his ilk are not those of the world’s Muslims. They are the beliefs of a handful of twisted psychopaths who have had to claw out a justification for murder by distorting the Koran. For every Koranic injunction they cite that tells them to smite the infidel, another says to regard both Christians and Jews as the children of God. Islamic martyrs do not spring unbidden from crowds of Muslim believers. The men and women who are used up in Islamic terror operations are cultivated, steeped in hatred, armed, and sent on their missions by cynical men who have cloaked their own hatred and venal ambition in the robes of religion.

Osama bin Laden was not born to be a monster. He was raised in an affluent and moderately religious Saudi family. He was a soft-spoken, retiring, impressionable boy who lost his father at a tender age. Like thousands of other Muslims who became extremists, Osama bin Laden came under the influence of men who were ruthless, brutal, and amoral. The only difference between Osama and a teenage body-bomber in Palestine is that Osama bin Laden had money—lots of it. And because he had money, Osama was sought out by men with extremist views. Hate requires capital to manifest itself in violence. Osama was flattered, he was cajoled, he was praised. He was told he was a sheik, a religious visionary, and a man whose deeds on earth would earn him a seat in paradise. He listened. He believed. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and came over to their belief that violence was necessary to set the world right.

It was all in the Koran, they said, and they could find it and point to it. Osama believed them, as did thousands of others. He bought in.

Suicide bombers are invariably sold the same bill of goods: seventy virgins will attend them in cool gardens and they may be joined by seventy more members of their family. It is almost impossible for a Westerner to grasp that these words would be adequate to convince a grown man to throw away his life—to blow himself to pieces—and worse, to take the lives of as many other human beings as he possibly could.

One intelligence analyst called Osama bin Laden “the Madonna of jihad,” meaning that he had a little talent and a lot of money. Osama never received any formal military training. He didn’t know how to wire a bomb, disassemble a rifle, or hijack an airplane. He was not a religious scholar and he possessed few skills either as a tactician or a strategist. What he had in abundance was cash.

Osama used his money, and he learned to use people as well, convincing others to embark on one-way missions to strike down godless infidels in great heaps. Like all terrorist leaders, Osama lacked personal courage. He never considered actually hijacking an airliner himself—that was for someone else. Mere
shaheeds
could do that. He was a sheik, a leader; it was for others to die. Osama would provide the means by which his dedicated followers could realize their own dreams of martyrdom. Osama was like a travel agent, selling one-way all-inclusive trips to Paradise.

Money is almost always power. Cash can buy weapons, rent muscle, and buy ideas from intelligent people. Osama was raised by a family that made its living by doing all of the above. Hiring immigrant labor and paying the salaries of Western-trained architects and civil engineers, the Bin Ladens transformed Saudi Arabia from a swath of desert to a country filled with palaces, superhighways, airports, and state-of-the-art petroleum facilities.

It was natural that a son of Mohammed bin Laden would think it possible to remake society. His father changed the face of a nation. Osama set his sights not on one country, or a region, but on the world. Mohammed bin Laden changed Saudi Arabia by working in concrete and steel; his son would try to remake the world in blood.

Osama might be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the United States was a paper tiger. He had no idea of the vastness of the United States, nor could he conceive of its military and technological reach.

Until 1983, Osama bin Laden had no worldview. His education had consisted of three years of business college. Few of his classes interested him much, and the hard science he needed for a degree in engineering had proved to be beyond his scholastic ability. Osama never in his life had to work at anything—cars, houses, hunting trips, business jets, women—these things came to him because he was a millionaire’s son. As an upper-class Saudi, Osama might also have felt that hard work, even academic work, was somewhat demeaning. He’d come from a family of high achievers and he withdrew from Abdul Aziz University before his academic failure became too spectacular. He’d lived a sheltered life, surrounded by servants. As a child of privilege he was unused to either effort or contradiction. When he pronounced an opinion, people agreed.

Osama bin Laden followed the progress of the Iranian Revolution intently; he believed, as many extremist Muslims did, that what the Iranians were seeking to create was the rule of God on earth. The face of the Iranian Revolution would eventually be revealed in starker terms, but at its inception the Ayatollah and his gang of mullahs and imams were greeted by the Iranian people with ecstasy.

Close upon the success of the Iranian Revolution came a reminder that the faith of Islam was not secure. On December 26, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. And it was there, in Afghanistan, that Osama bin Laden would begin his career as a leader of Jihad.

*   *   *

The heroic struggle of the Afghan people to throw off the Russian invaders was not at first a particularly religious endeavor. Despite myths of his own making, Osama bin Laden did not immediately travel to Afghanistan to join the Jihad. No one did. It would take several years for the struggle of the Afghan people to take on the religious character with which it is seen now. The first leaders of the Afghan resistance were not particularly devout men. They did not ask the Muslim world for assistance—only for weapons.

Though some Afghani warriors invoked the name of God and declared Jihad against the occupying Russians, most Afghan citizens saw their struggle in more down-to-earth terms—they had been invaded by the Russians and now did what they had always done when they found a would-be conqueror at their door: they waged total, bloody, and unmerciful war.

Like the Americans before them in Vietnam, the Russians would be defeated by an enemy that did not seek major engagements, had no standing armies and few fixed bases. They were up against ghost soldiers who struck their enemy at times and places of their own choosing and melted away whenever the Soviets tried to concentrate their forces.

Afghanistan has been aptly called the graveyard of empires. In twenty-five hundred years of recorded history, Afghanistan has never fielded a unified coherent army, yet it has defeated in turn the Macedonians under Alexander, the Mongols, the Huns, the British at the height of their imperial power, and the combined might of the entire Soviet military.

In 1973, King Mohammed Zahir Shah was overthrown. Earlier, in 1963, his introduction of a parliament, civil rights, free elections, and the vote for women were taken in stride, but the king was neither charismatic nor popular. A decade passed.

In quick succession, the Afghan government was headed by an ever more brutal series of Soviet puppets. In 1979, to stabilize their unruly protégés, the Soviets invaded, and the first Jihad of modern times began.

Thirteen thousand Russian soldiers were killed in the Soviet-Afghan war, and another fifty thousand were maimed or wounded. Afghan civilian casualties were incalculable, but probably number close to three million. More than five million Afghani civilians were made homeless and fled into Pakistan and Iran. During nine years of Soviet occupation, Muslims from all over the world came into Afghanistan to fight. Some were little more than adventure tourists, coming for a week, learning to shoot weapons at Jihad training camps, and coming home to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen to strut about in their new Pashto trousers. But others were serious and bloody-minded men. And a smaller portion of them were religious zealots.