Taipei Times – Bin Laden in his own words
`Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden’ give us a clearer idea of the man behind the image and al-Qaeda
There he (probably) squats, the most wanted man in the world. His world is a cave in the Hindu Kush or the badlands of Baluchistan. His life is constant flight. Maybe, because we’ve heard nothing from him for nearly a year now, he is wounded, cornered or dead. Maybe his famously loose network is unravel-ling faster than we think. Osama bin Laden, after all, is a turbaned crackpot, a mad mullah, an evil monster. Isn’t he?
Alas for such simplicities. If you read the texts of what he’s said and justified over the last decade, if you put aside soundbites and White House mantras, then any persuasive answer emerges cloaked in complexity.
Here, with a shrewd, scholarly introduction from Bruce Lawrence, is the complete bin Laden reader, from his early days when the House of Saud was enemy number one to his final advice to US President George W. Bush, John Kerry and America’s voters on the right way to win an election. It is full of brusque, slightly surprising judgments: “Saddam Hussein is a thief and an apostate.” He can sometimes turn a neat, almost humorous phrase. Bush has declared, a “Crusade attack” and the odd thing about this is that he has “taken the words right out of our mouth.” Most strikingly, it deals in facts and assertions that can’t easily be brushed aside.
Bin Laden, guerrilla warrior against the Russians in Afghanistan, campaigner against Riyadh sleaze, fulminating opponent of American influence in his region and implacable foe of Ariel Sharon (if he “is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush, then we are also men of peace”), is not some random icon to the backstreets of Baghdad and Damascus.
He is formidable, an image, a force. If you’re looking for a British parallel, though their policies have nothing in common, the politician he most reminds me of is radical former Labour minister Tony Benn, convincing as always about a golden past that has been betrayed, unveiling statistical amazements and historical myths with equal facility, always seeming safe within a cocoon of certitude.
Could bin Laden, like so many terrorists before him, be drawn into some kind of deal?
It’s impossible, not because the man himself couldn’t wheel and deal (if you chart his varying degrees of denial over 9/11 or Dar or Nairobi, you see a trimmer in a jam, a negotiator in search of a bargain), but because he has nothing to offer his foes.
You might just construct a “peace plan” where the Riyadh regime changed, Israel was pinned back to its earliest borders and the US army went home, but nobody who matters would be interested. This is a fight to the end, Osama’s end. The only real question is how his legend will live.
The problem, as Lawrence says, is that bin Laden has no vision of the society he would wish to create, apart from a few thin riffs on Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan.
He merely wants to blow the house down or up. His is a “narrow, limited creed.” The lads who flock to his banner would soon grow restless if they had to live in Osamaland on “scriptural dictates, poetic transports and binary prescriptions.”
