The mythology which informs Abrahamic monotheism arose from the Syro-Arabian desert–the birth-place of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Here water and tillable land were scarce. “Mother Nature” was harsh and couldn’t be trusted. And neither—according to this mythology—should the competing Great Mother deities of the region (as depicted by iconographic symbols, such as “the golden calf” mentioned in the Bible). And so, the conflicts prevailing still in this part of the world, have had a long and anguished history.
Beneath the caricature, Osama bin Laden was a vision of a soft-spoken righteousness armed with hostile potency, prophetic and war-like at the same time. He had been quite forthright in announcing his war goals. The first was that the main target of his war was to become “the far enemy”–the United States. For until 9/11, Al Qaeda’s membership had been divided about whether the prime enemy should be the far enemy, or whether they should continue their historical strategy of attacking the “near enemy”–the autocratic regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab nations. The long-shot mission of 9/11 was meant to end the divisiveness within Al Qaeda. And in its astonishing success, it did.
With the first war goal victoriously clarified, bin Laden’s next goal became to “bleed” and “bankrupt” America by luring it into a long-standing foreign war–which was exactly the strategy that the mujahedeen had successfully employed against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Related goals were to destroy America’s political unity, and to spread the
U.S. military resources so thin it could no longer adequately respond as an imperial force in the world. In essence, he attempted to dethrone the mythic omnipotence of the U.S., and thus lessen its influence in the Islamic world.
Though during his lifetime bin Laden was to fail in his larger goal of driving the U.S. out of the Middle East and weakening the Arab regimes with which the Americans were allied, what gave him his near-legendary stature were two things. First, how long he remained uncaptured. And second, his prophetically correct assessment that America would lack long- range resolve, and would prove as sluggish and misguided a foe as the Soviets.
However, his prophetic assessment was only partially correct. For within a month of 9/11 a remarkably small contingent of American forces had done something impressive. They’d ousted the Taliban. A successful and devastating air campaign begun on October 7, 2001 had sent the Taliban fleeing the cities– along with bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces– all running for the mountains.
They became trapped in the mountains of Tora Bora, and were subjected to massive air bombardment. This bombardment included 15,000 pound “Daisy Cutter” bombs capable of vaporizing human beings and pulverizing granite caves into powdery dust. The predicament bin Laden was facing was so dire, that intercepted radio communiques revealed that the Al Qaeda leader had asked his followers to forgive him for getting them pinned down by the Americans.
And though bin Laden wasn’t aware of it, something just as ominous seemed in the wings. (For CIA field commander Gary Berntsen had radioed for reinforcements to intercept bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces from the opposite direction, before they could escape to Pakistan). While this was going on the Al Qaeda leader asked his followers to pray. And following that collective prayer, something bewildering took place. And it would decisively impact the next ten years.
What happened was that Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, refused the request for reinforcements–though a thousand marines were close enough to be air-lifted in. And bin Laden was allowed to escape.
Unbeknownst to both bin Laden and almost all of America’s military, the Bush regime had begun to make a strategic shift whereby Special Forces and Predator drones were to be redirected from Afghanistan to Iraq. The staff of Vice President Cheney had been circulating through the highest echelons of the government in making the case that hunting down individual terrorists was a more difficult and less skillful use of military resources than applying an overwhelming force to the nation-states suspected of harboring terrorists.
And with bin Laden already fleeing Afghanistan, it was thought that country was too impoverished to pose any ongoing threat to the most powerful military in the world. And further, the neo-cons in the Bush cabinet–who had been experienced Cold War warriors– had developed their experience in an era when the threat had been that of well-armed enemy states. An impoverished, leaderless, and divided Afghanistan didn’t meet the eye-test.
And besides, the neo-cons wanted to do something more impressive than just capture or kill the relatively small band actually responsible for 9/11. They felt America needed to make a larger statement to the world. In Iraq, through “shock and awe,” the world would be shown just how powerful America really is. However–through what seemed “the law of unintended consequences” that was to plague American foreign policy in the Middle East– actually the opposite occurred.
With Iraq chosen as proxy whipping boy for 9/11, American forces invaded it to remove its dictator from the “weapons of mass destruction” that he didn’t have. Over the following years the Taliban was able to reconstitute itself in Afghanistan. While the Al Qaeda splinter group (ISIS) which formed in Iraq and Syria, then spread to 30 other countries.
But people will say anything to stop being tortured. And so, rather than providing valuably needed intel, the narrative of Americans torturing Muslims became an unintended recruiting aid for jihad. And bin Laden remained at large for another ten years.
Aside from how long it took the most powerful military force in the world to finally hunt him down, what is equally astonishing is the extent to which bin Laden succeeded in accomplishing his war goals. Much more so–some might argue–than had been the case with the war aims of the United States. For during the U.S. “war against terror” it would financially hemorrhage from nearly two decades of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this had left Congress hard-pressed to pass a budget for several of the upcoming fiscal years.
Yet the U.S. government’s financial crisis had been due in part to its own forms of False Citadel. First, in starting the war in Iraq based on a false premise (the putative belief in the existence of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”–a narrative that Colin Powell had been induced to announce, and which was to taint an overwise illustrious career). And secondly, the equally putative assumption of a collaborative relationship between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. (For in truth, secular Arab dictators like Saddam were the very “near enemy” that Al Qaeda had always opposed).
America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had also been fought on a credit card—by borrowing funds we didn’t have from the Chinese, hoping to pass the debt onto future generations–and where the cost had been, reputedly, a million dollars a missile. (Which is but chump change compared to what the total estimated cost will be of “the three trillion dollar war” in Iraq.1 Or the hundred billion dollars a year we’d reputedly been spending in Afghanistan).
These wars had also been fought under the banner, and ostensibly to serve and protect the spread of Democracy in the world, with “Democracy” become a concept reified and equated with Truth, regardless of whether our version of Democracy is what other nations really want, are ready for, or need. And in the decades since 9/11 the U.S. had become more bitterly divided (as bin Laden intended). And so much so that its version of democracy was to become severely stressed–by a secular, anti-democratic president as corrupt as any Arab dictator; yet one who would pose holding a Bible in front of a church while he summoned Federal troops to put down the lawful protests of his country’s own people. And then, a few months later, he summoned an angry mob to undo his own electoral loss.
In the luxury of historical hindsight it might be apparent by now, that in Osama bin Laden we were not just dealing with some run of the mill “fanatic” –though he was that too, but also in some ways an extraordinary man; a most potent adversary, one who had affected our culture more than anyone in the previous half century. For as Michael Scheuer (the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden desk) has pointed out, unlike the Palestinians or the Iraqis who are forever bickering with each other, Osama managed to lead a very cohesive and well-organized international force. The scanning devices that now delay our passage through airports are the grim and lingering monuments to bin Laden and his force.
1 Bilmes and Stiglitz. The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008
What Osama had consistently conveyed to the West had been a warning, and then a response when that warning was not heeded. For bin Laden had an instinctual presence about him, like the harsh beauty of a desert scorpion in the readiness to strike back.
In this way–to what had become the adversaries of the U.S.–he stood for what has been lost, and as well for a vision of victory that might yet be gained. His appeal to parts of the Islamic world had thus been that of a David courageously facing a Goliath; and as mentioned, earlier in Afghanistan he already proved himself capable of helping to bring down one Goliath—the Soviet Union. And until the unarmed bin Laden was executed by shots to the head and chest by a Navy Seal kill squad, he retained some aura of an impervious Bronze age warlord, akin to a Muslim David or Joshua, but for the satellite radio—or AK47– often photographed in his hand.
Osama bin Laden was one of 54 children born from the 22 marriages of Mohammed Awad bin Laden. Anyone writing psychobiography should have a field day with that. And let them try. I will prune my own narrative, by keeping things closer to the bone.
The elder bin Laden had built a fortune as a building contractor for the Saudi royal family. And though Osama, the 17th child, was killed in a Pakistani version of mansion– and had been raised in the lap of luxury–the mythic Osama had turned his back on all that, in order to fight, and live in caves. “In Saudi Arabia,” a bin Laden sister in law relates, “you can’t be too religious.”
Osama bin Laden thus often evoked the gaunt and virile strength of renunciation–itself a facet of the Citadel, or in this case, at least its approximate—or counterfeit version; a humble emptiness that might be filled with the strength of an archetype. But if he in fact was “channeling” an archetype, a god, is this, his version of God—as he seemed to believe–the only god, and thus one all devout people should find worth dying for? (Clearly not, most would say, including most Muslims—for whom bin Laden’s death was really quite a relief; one they hoped might have ended the conflation of Islam with terrorism).
But like the mythic past that inspired him, bin Laden arose from a landscape where an intensity of light at once creates stark contrast and the ultimate shadow. In this dualistic aridity, what little moisture there is seems quickly to ascend to heaven—which was the destination promised for his fallen compatriots and those who would follow his example.
And though al Qaeda and other terrorist affiliates in the region recruit and draw strength from the Islamic promise of Paradise for those who have died fighting in a religious campaign, this—we must remember–is the same heavenly kettle of fish once promised to Christians when Pope Urban II sent crusaders to the Holy Land after promising “remission of sins” to all Christians fighting Muslims. Similarly, the red cross on the robes of the Knights Templar symbolized martyrdom, and their death in battle was believed not only the greatest of earthly honors, but assuring them a place in heaven. (When violent fervor and God are conflated, what kind of god, what kind of Citadel is this?).
In the Syro-Arabian desert– the birthing ground of all three of our prevailing monotheistic religions–for thousands of years now God and battle have been inextricably linked. Here, life is not lush, nor the living easy. It is informed by bones of the past bleached in the sun, by the dead and their sacrifices, and by a faith whose ultimate reward will only come in the hereafter. In this way the desert is the shadow of the more garden-like Paradise; they need each other, for each possesses what the other is lacking.
With life viewed from–and as– a desert, and the garden of “Paradise” as its more ample complement, monotheistic fundamentalism has commonly sought to return us to the ways of the past as the means through which to enter Heaven or Paradise. But this desert past, as I’ve been attempting to evoke, was—and remains– an arid and stressful, if not a bloody locale.
With his ancient, traditional garb and AK47 in hand, in bin Laden the archaic was armed with the weaponry of modernity, the perfect nightmare—or salvation—depending upon one’s point of view. The man was an enigma. He was an idealist, a modern Arab knight tilting his sword—yet the ultimate embodiment of Realpolitik. As such he was both polarizing and magnetizing, and like a prophet strangely able to re-contextualize the world, to bend minds and hearts to the shape and terms of his own mythic imagination. (Yet the same could be said for his “near enemy,” the autocratic regimes he opposed).
For every social movement contains within it the seeds of fundamentalism, something it would reify and idealize, and toward which it would attempt to return to as its “Paradise lost.” The false nostalgia of Trumpism, for example, would make America “great again.” And Putin too–as we’ll see later in this book–has promised the same for Russia. While the nostalgic fundamentalism of America’s Woodstock generation first went “back to the land” – a romanticized impulse toward a pre-historical Eden and a worship of Gaia.
While the fundamentalism of Osama bin Laden sought to reconnect back to the prophet Mohammed, a prophetic ideal which he felt had been sold out, beginning with his own homeland of Saudi Arabia. And it was the evocative echo of this linkage with Mohammed— himself a veteran of some seventy plus battle campaigns–that had enabled bin Laden to galvanize some portion of the Islamic world.
For if an Imitatio Christi, an imitation of Christ, has seeded the mythic imagination of Christianity, then an imitation of Mohammed informs the mythic imagination of Islam, as well as its conceptualization of jihad. And so, for many Muslims the person of Osama bin Laden arose in the context of historical tradition, and in such a way that it became a challenge to one’s own commitment to religious ideals. For regardless of what one may have thought of Osama bin Laden, like Mohammed himself, few (as long as he lived) had questioned the man’s courage, his readiness to put his own life on the line.
However misguided, Osama bin Laden gave every appearance of a brave man–though this perception was countered by the narrative of his death offered by the U.S. government, which at one point portrayed him as hiding behind a woman as the Navy Seals appeared on the scene and took his life. However, the U.S. narrative seemed to be a work in progress. For at first we were told that he was killed while bearing a weapon, while later told that bin Laden wasn’t armed at the moment he was shot. What seems undisputed, however, is that he had been wounded at least four times in battle, before the bullet wounds that finally ended his life.
By comparison, very few on either side of the divide he helped create have lived at his heroic, mythic pitch. And so, not only for the West, but for many Muslims as well, Osama—like prophetic figures in general—often stood as a living rebuke.
Though by the time of “the Arab spring,” bin Laden had become seemingly less relevant, for the better part of a decade the questions he posed for the Islamic world were these: Was he the model of what a man surrendered to God should be like today? Was he the light, or the shadow that desert light—and the monotheism that has arisen from it—often seems to magnify? Was he a modern Saladin—that most famous Muslim hero and consummate military tactician who defeated the Christian crusaders in taking back Jerusalem, and who like bin Laden was noted for his lack of pretension, and generosity with his own personal wealth?
Or was he the archaic embodiment of the polarizing vitriol that continues to plague our religious and political imagination… and thus, did something in Osama’s backward-looking vision that sought to do justly, fail to do justice to how a divinely inspired vision would respond to the realities of the 21st century?
Depending on one’s view, Osama bin Laden could be seen as embodying all of these facets—and more. Most of all he seemed a kind of call, a wake-up call—and in different ways, again depending on one’s point of view. For fellow Muslims he saw himself as a living call–to arms. For the West his calling card—tragically left on 9/11—was a reminder of our own vulnerability, and that no nation is omnipotent, not even one that spends nearly as much on armaments as the rest of the world combined.
For asymmetrical warfare levels the playing field in favor of smaller, underfinanced, but inspired grassroots forces. Vietnam might have taught us that. (Hubris however, doesn’t learn from history. Nor does psychopathy, and why the recidivism rates of psychopaths in prisons are so high). And both unknowingly create a Nemesis that ever pursues and plagues it.
During the first decade of the 21st century bin Laden appeared as the face of America’s Nemesis, the Lex Luther–or Kryptonite–to our Superpower complex. For a case could be made that America’s own “imperial hubris” was at least equally culpable for decades of costly, failed foreign wars. (Michael Scheuer made this very case in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror). While the divisive “near enemy” of a psychopathic president was to prove as hard to bring to justice in the years that followed.
As I’ve suggested, there are inherent problems when guns and religion share the same stage–or for that matter, when psychopaths lend their hands to any cause, for the cause itself then becomes sullied, as has been the impact of Trump upon his political party, or Putin upon his country. (As a counterpoint, when bin Laden was first approached by Abu Musab Zarqawi–the psychopath who would one day lead ISIS– Zarqawi’s extensive criminal past created major friction and distrust within bin Laden when the two first met in Afghanistan in 1999. In fact, Osama bin Laden wanted nothing to do with such an unprincipled man, one later to be known as “Sheikh of the Slaughterers.”
In short, had bin Laden lived a thousand or more years earlier, I believe we’d have a more balanced view of him today. And so, if in the West we’ve solely viewed bin Laden as a shadowy, demonic figure, then perhaps we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the strengths of his character—such as his courage, tactical prowess, generosity, commitment, and the sheer force of his political will–for these traits, at least of the mythic Osama, accounted for his appeal to millions of people. But neither should we turn a blind eye to the other facet of his mythic character–for bin Laden (and his version of will) was also a poster child for the False Citadel, for religious ethnocentrism, for monotheistic fundamentalism when it becomes malignant.
And like a malignant growth, bin Laden was the expression of a two-sided cancerous symptom toward which we shouldn’t any longer stay in denial. For he was also showing us that there has been something very damaging about the way that Western democracies— beginning with Great Britain, and more lately the United States—had expressed their political will in the Muslim world; and that there will be grave consequences if this pattern continues. (As it unfortunately has, when the U.S. continues to support a right wing Israeli government in its genocidal atrocities against Israel’s Palestinian population).
In writing his revised obituary—and regardless of whether he was hated, feared, or revered–Osama bin Laden was perhaps the most imaginatively charged figure of our time. (If Trump and Putin haven’t since replaced him).
He became a living archetype–a desert god’s martyred warrior. And for this reason, even after his death he will–like Elvis—in some way live on. For archetypes do not die. And as the Jungians have told us, when we identify with an archetype, we are doomed to suffer the fate of that archetype.
What remains to be seen is whether his death will amount to a conclusive lessening of the mythic and political impulse he epitomized. Or whether his death– in a part of the world that has idealized martyrdom –will continue to inspire others to follow his example, and thus, continue to plague us from his unmarked, watery grave.
