Declaring War Bin Laden’s August 23, 1996, declaration of war on the United States was published in the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi and, to ensure wide distribution in Saudi Arabia, on the UK-based Saudi dissident Web site Al-Islah on September 2.28 The statement marked a sharp shift in his assessment of why Islam’s main enemies had proven so hard to defeat. In the 1994–1996 ARC communiqués discussed earlier, bin Laden’s main focus had been on reforming or defeating the corruption, misrule, and un-Islamic behavior—especially in matters relating to foreign policy—of the Saudi royal family. To be sure, bin Laden used the communiqués to indict Riyadh’s kowtowing to the United States and following Washington’s orders, but his main target clearly was the Saudi regime. The August declaration, however, showed that bin Laden had rethought his position. While he still regarded the Saudi regime as corrupt and un-Islamic and used much of the declaration to outline the king’s misrule, he concluded that the al-Sauds and Islam’s other major enemies—Israel and the tyrannical governments in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, and so on—were capable of oppressing Muslims because of the monetary, military, and political support they received from the United States. By shifting attention to the United States, bin Laden implemented an idea he had broached a year earlier: that al-Qaeda’s focus in the Kingdom should be on the American occupiers, “the sponsor not the sponsored”; the al-Sauds, after all, were merely the “shadow of the U.S. presence.”29 The details of the 1996 declaration have been amply examined,30 but the gist of it was well captured in bin Laden’s rather homespun explanation to his son of why it was wisest to identify and then attack the enemy’s weak- est link. Although he was talking here about giving priority to attacks on the United States before Israel, his rationale is the same for attack- ing America before going after the Muslim tyrannies. Omar bin Laden had asked why not attack Israel before America, given that Israel was a “small country near to us,” while America was a “huge country far away from our shores.” My father paused before explaining it this way. “Omar, try to imagine a two-wheeled bicycle. One wheel is made of steel. The other wheel is made of wood. Now, my son, if you wanted to destroy the bicycle, would you destroy the wooded or the steel wheel?” “The wooden wheel of course,” I replied. “You are correct my son. Remember this: America and Israel are one bicycle with two wheels. The wooden wheel ORGANIZER, 1996–2001 | 111 112 | OSAMA BIN LADEN represents the United States. The steel wheel represents Israel. Omar, Israel is the stronger power of the two. Does a general attack the strongest line when in battle? No, he con- centrates on the weakest part of the line. The Americans are weak. It is best to attack the weakest point first. Once we take out the weak wooden wheel, the steel wheel will automatically fail. Who can ride a bicycle with only one wheel?” He patted my knee with his hand. “First we obliterate America. By that I don’t mean militarily. We can destroy Amer- ica from within by making it economically weak, until its mar- kets collapse. When that happens, they will have no interest in supplying Israel with arms, for they will not have extra funds to do so. At that time, the steel wheel will corrode and be destroyed by lack of attention. “That’s what we [Muslims] did to the Russians. We bled blood from their body in Afghanistan. The Russians spent all of their wealth on the war in Afghanistan. When they could no longer finance the war, they fled. After fleeing their whole system collapsed. Holy Warriors defending Afghanistan are the ones responsible for bringing a huge nation to its knees. We can do the same thing with America and Israel. We only have to be patient.”31 And so the United States would henceforth be al-Qaeda’s fixed objec- tive, with bin Laden arguing that the victory God promised Muslims could be achieved if they pursued three war aims: (a) drive the United States from as much of the Muslim world as possible; (b) destroy Israel and the oppressive Muslim tyrannies; and (c) settle accounts with the heretical Shia. Bin Laden insisted, moreover, that the three goals be pursued seriatim and not in parallel, for reasons more fully explored in chapter 6. This strategy was clearly laid out in the twelve- page declaration—which some Westerners claim to find turgid—and from the day of its issue to today, no one, whether in the United States, the West, or the Muslim world, can justifiably profess doubt that U.S. policies motivated bin Laden, and have inspired other Muslims to sup- port that struggle by picking up arms, donating funds, or offering prayers. An anti-U.S. defensive jihad was mandatory for six reasons: 1. The U.S. military and civilian presence in the Prophet’s homeland on the Arabian Peninsula 2. Washington’s protection and support for tyrannical Mus- lim governments 3. Washington’s unquestioning and unqualified support for Israel 4. Washington’s support for countries that oppress Muslims, especially Russia, China, and India 5. U.S. and Western exploitation of Muslim energy resources at below-market prices 6. The U.S. military presence in the Muslim world outside the Arab Peninsula32 Bin Laden would sharpen and refine these points in future public statements, but they would otherwise remain unchanged. They would, moreover, gradually be adopted as casus belli by Islamist groups from Nigeria to Pakistan to the Pacific, as well as among individuals and groups in the Sunni Muslim diasporas in Europe and North America. Bin Laden supplanted in a swoop the appeals by Muslim leaders for an anti-U.S. jihad based on America’s “debauched and degenerate” lifestyle. To be sure, bin Laden and his followers deemed the West degenerate and debauched; no country they governed would look like Canada. But the Islamists had witnessed two decades of failure by Iran’s leaders to ignite a jihad against Western decadence. The reality was that as long as the West did not try to impose its decadence—for which many Muslims considered “democracy” a synonym—in the Islamic world, Muslims would live and let live; few were or are willing to die in a jihad against congressional elections, gender equality, R-rated movies, or Budweiser. Cultural-political considerations have not been part of bin Laden’s jihadist rhetoric; indeed, only others— particularly U.S. and Western political, military, and media leaders— have tried to persuade people that al-Qaeda and its allies are motivated by such factors. This is the main reason the West is losing to the Islamists. Bin Laden’s declaration of war was followed eighteen months later by a fatwa ordering and authorizing “jihad against the Crusaders and Jews” and announcing the creation of the “World Islamic Front ORGANIZER, 1996–2001 | 113 114 | OSAMA BIN LADEN against Crusaders and Jews,” an organization composed of al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri’s EIJ, and four other Islamist groups. Unlike the declara- tion of war, the February 23, 1998, fatwa was signed by several fully credentialed Islamic scholars, thus giving it religious authority. In addition, assemblies of Islamic scholars in Afghanistan and Pakistan gave the fatwa “confirmation and authorization” shortly after its publi- cation.33 This authorization may be the document’s central impor- tance, one long ignored in the West. While the evidence at hand suggests that the World Front never gelled as an organization, the fatwa gave the call for defensive jihad theological gravitas.34 Hence- forth, other Islamic scholars could denigrate the document and issue counter-fatwas, but the result has simply been an unending debate about whose fatwa was bigger, a debate that has not repealed the World Front’s mandate. The core of the 1998 fatwa read, “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an indi- vidual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. . . . We—with God’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill Americans and plunder their money whenever they find it.”35 This, then, gave the necessary religious grounding to bin Laden’s defensive jihad—making it an “individual duty for every Muslim”— and permitting the targeting of U.S. civilian as well as military per- sonnel in Saudi Arabia and around the world. The fatwa was both theologically valid, bin Laden argued, and commonsensical. “If the Israelis are killing the small children in Palestine and Americans are killing innocent people in Iraq [via sanctions], and if a majority of the American people support their dissolute president [Clinton],” he explained, “this means the American people are fighting us and we have the right to target them.”36 The fatwa’s call for “plundering” U.S. money would eventually give priority to attacks meant to damage the U.S. economy. After the fatwa’s publication, bin Laden argued assiduously for a defensive jihad based on the principle of reciprocity that goes to the core of Islamic war making and the West’s idea of just war. A human life is a human life, he said, and the lives of Muslims and all other people are of equal worth and equally worth defending. “There are two sides in this conflict,” bin Laden said in late 1998: world crusaders allied to Jewish Zionists [and] led by the United States, Britain, and Israel, and on the other side the Islamic world. In such a conflict, it is unacceptable for the first side to launch an aggression, enter my land, property, and sanctities, and plunder the Muslims’ oil, and then say the Muslims are terrorists when it faces any resistance from them. This is stupid, or they think others are stupid. We think it is our Shariah duty to resist occupation with all our strength and punish it by the same means it uses against us.37 The killing of innocent civilians, as Americans and some intel- lectuals claim, is really very strange talk. Who said our chil- dren and civilians are not innocent, and that shedding their blood is justified? That it is lesser in degree? When we kill their innocents, the entire world from west to east screams at us, and America rallies its allies and agents, and the sons of its agents. Who said our blood is not blood, but theirs is? Who made this pronouncement? Who has been getting killed in our countries for decades? More than one million children, more than one million children have died in Iraq and others are dying [due to sanctions]. Why do we not hear someone screaming or condemning, or even someone’s words of conso- lation or condolence?38
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 07:47:40 +0000
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