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What Does Osama Bin Laden Want?Nothing we have.

By David Plotz
Posted Friday, Sept. 14, 2001, at 2:30 AM ET
Osama Bin Laden

To no one's surprise, Secretary of State Colin Powell today named Osama Bin Laden as a prime suspect in Tuesday's attacks. Bin Laden's brutal record is well known. The United States indicted him for masterminding the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Saudi fugitive was also reportedly connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1993 killing of American soldiers in Somalia, mid-'90s bombings of U.S. facilities in Saudi Arabia, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Authorities have prevented Bin Laden associates from launching attacks during the millennium celebrations, bombing a dozen trans-Pacific flights in 1995, and assassinating the pope and President Clinton in the Philippines.

This is what Bin Laden does. But why does he do it? What does he want?

(If you want more background about Bin Laden's personal history and about how his organization, al-Qaida ("The Base"), works, click here.)

Bin Laden is the most notorious advocate of a potent strain of militant Islam that has been gaining popularity in the Muslim world for 30 years. It is simultaneously theological and cultural. Its fundamental tenet is that the Muslim world is being poisoned and desecrated by infidels. These infidels include both outsiders such as the United States and Israel, and governments of Muslim states—such as Egypt and Jordan—that have committed apostasy. The infidels must be driven out of the Muslim world by a jihad, and strict Islamic rule must be established everywhere that Muslims live. These extreme "Islamists," as Bin Laden biographer Yossef Bodansky dubs them, hope to re-establish the Caliphate, the golden age of Muslim domination that followed the death of Muhammad. They regard the Taliban's Afghanistan as a model for such Islamic rule.

This Islamist militancy has ancient roots—Saladin's expulsion of the crusaders in the 12th century is one starting point—but it was galvanized in the 1970s by several events. The growing influence of secular Western capitalism in the Muslim world, the military triumphs of Israel, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan horrified Islamic traditionalists. The Afghanistan invasion was the culminating moment: It persuaded Bin Laden and thousands of others of the need for Islamic holy war. Their fervor has only increased since, fueled by the Palestinian intifada, the Gulf War, the American operation in Somalia, and other conflicts of Islam with the West.

(The Islamists are not merely Pan-Arab but Pan-Islamic. Bin Laden is exceptional in his ability to recruit from all over the Muslim world. The Sunni Muslim world, that is. Bin Laden and his allies follow a very strict Sunni Islam.)

That is Bin Laden's general philosophy. What is his particular grievance against the United States? According to CNN's Peter Bergen, author of a forthcoming book on Bin Laden, Holy War, Inc., Bin Laden is most enraged by the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was incensed when the Saudis invited U.S. troops to their defense after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Bin Laden—like many Muslims—considers the continued presence of these armed infidels in Saudi Arabia the greatest possible desecration of the holy land. That is why he sponsored bombings of the American military facilities in Saudi Arabia, why he has tried to destabilize the Saudi government, and why the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed on Aug. 7, 1998—eight years to the day after the first American troops were dispatched to Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden is also furious about American support for Israel. He detests Jews and views the United States as the Jewish lackey. ("[Jews] believe that all humans are created for their use, and they found that the Americans are the best-created beings for that use," Bin Laden has said.) His supporters seem particularly exercised by Israel's reaction to the current intifada, Bergen says. Bin Laden also can't tolerate American alliances with moderate Arab governments in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.

Mainstream Muslims denounce Bin Laden's bloody-mindedness—in 1998 he issued a fatwa calling for attacks on all Americans—but he has found plenty of firebrand clerics to offer Quranic backing for his belief that terrorism is glorious. According to Bodansky, these mullahs insist that all methods of war, including terrorism, are justified in the battle against the infidels. (Bin Laden, holding up a Quran, puts it this way: "You cannot defeat the heretic with this book alone. You have to show them the fist.")

Bin Laden has strategic reasons to believe in terrorism, too. The Muslim victory over the Soviet Union in Afghanistan showed him that superpowers are not so superpowerful. And the ignominious American withdrawal from Somalia—following a Bin Laden connected attack—convinced him that the United States is morally weak. The U.S. soldier is "a paper tiger" who crumples after "a few blows."

It is a mistake to assume that killing Bin Laden means killing his movement. It's true that Bin Laden is an iconic leader who inspires his followers and millions of sympathizers in the Muslim world. But eliminating Bin Laden would do nothing to decrease the intensity of the other militant Islamists. The Afghan war created a cadre of warriors and belligerent clerics who are constantly recruiting. Bin Laden has a core of highly trained aides ready to continue his work. His trainees are scattered in two dozen countries. It is hard to imagine how the United States could neutralize all of them. And attacks on Bin Laden have only increased his popularity: Killing him would likely rally many more Muslims to his cause.

(Some pundits have suggested that killing Bin Laden would be effective because it would stanch the flow of cash to terrorists. This may not be so. Bin Laden's groups do get funds from his personal fortune, but they also finance operations by dunning wealthy Gulf Arabs and by siphoning off donations to Muslim charities. And the terror organization is cheap. They don't use heavy weapons, and it costs almost nothing to house and train hundreds of men in Afghanistan.)

Is there anything we can do to persuade Bin Laden to stop? The terror groups Americans are familiar with—Palestinian bombers and hijackers, IRA hard men—have desires we understand. They perform acts of terror in order to gain sympathy or sow fear. That sympathy or fear is a means to their end: political recognition, a state, compensation. They seek to participate in our world.

But Bin Laden and his followers are alarming because they don't want anything from us. They don't want our sympathy. They want no material thing we can offer them. They don't want to participate in the community of nations. (They don't really believe in the nation-state.) They are motivated by religion, not politics. They answer to no one but their god, so they certainly won't answer to us.

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David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at .
Photograph of Osama Bin Laden by Ho/Reuters.
If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


For Muslims, religion and politics are to some degree the same thing. The Will of God is realized in public, historical action more than in private devotion. Bin Laden wants above all to force all Muslims, and the governments of Muslim countries, to publicly choose to be for God or against Him. Being for God means ejecting or ruling non-believers in their midst, refusing to adopt Western practices and values, unwavering support for the Palestinians and implacable hostility to Israel. The attacks in the United States are intended to provoke us into rash action against Islamic targets--Taliban, Iraq, Libya--and into a closer alliance with the Sharon government. Up to now, we have criticized strong Israeli action against Palestinian terrorism; bin Laden is betting we will now emulate it and encourage Israel to do more. These actions on our part will, in turn, make it harder than ever for Islamic moderates to do business with the United States and to favor some negotiated resolution of the Palestinian question. Bin Laden's true targets are the governments of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. He is trying to engineer a situation in which they will be forced to show whether they are true believers or not.

While Plotz is right that removing bin-Laden will not in itself eradicate the web he has spun, I would guess that bin Laden's personal fanaticism, charisma and wealth are indispensible to sustaining it in the long run. He would not be easily replaced.

--Yukon

(To reply, click here.)


In a sad and terrible way, bin Laden is a product of the modern entrepreneurial spirit, which sees success in business as proof of existential worth. His success in the construction business and the money he got from that went to his head, and made him think he could box with God, the mullahs, Uncle Sam, world opinion, and the very stones of the earth itself.

Modern technology is at his disposal because he is free from the basic moral imperative to "honor thy father", which in his case would mean honoring the very conservative cultural position of mainstream Islamic leaders. In Islam novelty and technology are not appreciated for their own sake. For a thousand years or more, Islamic culture has been wary of too much change too soon. This attitude is embedded in the slogan "respect the phenomenon" which doesn't translate into English well, but means, respect what people imagine to be true as much as you respect what you know to be true in a logical and scientific sense. This attitude acts as a social flywheel which averages out change and makes the pace of innovation in Islamic culture very stately and slow.

Bin Laden embraces technology and change at the level of logistics and strategy, because he sets himself up as not just a scriptural authority, but a social authority above the "fathers" of his own country. There is a weakness here that the Western authorities haven't grasped yet. They are afraid of him, and respect his enterprising and innovative use of technology too much because of their (our) own cultural prejudice… Bin Laden is really vulnerable because he is cut off from the source of validation he seeks so desperately in his own homeland. Strike at the gap between his heart and that validation, and you strike at the man. Strike at the walls that hide him, or the people who seek salvation though him, and you hit nothing.

Bin Laden is doable. His organization will have momentum without him, but it will not have navigation, and will steer at random until it hits something and breaks into a thousand pieces.

--Zeitguy

(To reply, click here.)

 (9/17)

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