The Enemy
Christopher Hitchens
Recalling a forbidding figure of early authority in his Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison wrote that “whether we liked him or not, he was never out of our minds. That was a secret of leadership.” In reaction to a certain mode of flag-displaying faux national unity after the cataclysmic events of 11 September 2001, I wrote an article that proposed instead a sort of activist reticence that might be better designed for a long and arduous confrontation. In this attempt, I annexed a slogan that was adopted by some French citizens after the agonizing loss to Germany of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. “Always think of it: never speak of it.” Instead of grand proclamations about a “Global War on Terrorism,” or consoling but misleading injunctions from President Bush to consider “America” on the one hand and “the terrorists” on the other, it would be better to cultivate a low but intense flame, designed to burn indefinitely rather than to flare up, and directed not merely at the remorseless grinding-down of al-Qaeda as an organization but at its discredit; at the steady, detailed refutation of Osama bin Laden’s false claim to ventriloquize the wretched of the earth. As a matter of work and habit I am a vocal person, so I cannot seriously claim to have kept literally to the second part of the injunction. But it did have the effect of ensuring that I thought about the founder and leader of al-Qaeda almost every day, and either read something about him or wrote something about him almost every month, very persistently over the next decade. And, now that he is dead, the requirement to reflect upon him has by no means been cancelled.
It became a commonplace to say that “everything changed” on that brilliant fall morning in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Nobody’s life has been untouched. Onerous and risible travel restrictions, involving the collective punishment of the innocent, have had their impact at the level of banality. The decision of the Bush administration to try and prohibit real-time transmission of bin Laden’s video-sermons—lest they convey coded messages to “sleeper cells!”—tested ordinary definitions of stupidity as well as added to the aura of mystique, scope and potency that rapidly formed around his person. The decision to alter the balance of power in the Muslim world, and to forcibly replace the Taliban and Ba’ath Party despotisms in Afghanistan and Iraq, either was or was not the harbinger of the inspiring if vertiginous “Arab Spring” that burst out of such apparently unpromising soil in the opening months of 2011. On either interpretation, those interventions had momentous consequences that had not been foreseen by bin Laden, who had convinced himself and persuaded others that the United States no longer possessed the will to fight.
I live in Washington and slightly knew one of the passengers who was flown into the outer walls of the Pentagon that morning. I’m also a frequent visitor to the television studios that have, as their picture-window backdrop, a commanding view of the United States Capitol. To this day, I seldom pass the Dome without trying and failing to imagine how it might have looked if another flight—United Airlines 93—had plunged into it: a contingency that was only a few minutes’ flying time away, and averted only by a heroic combat on the part of the passengers. This catastrophe for democracy would have been visible over the shoulders of the network anchors … The Dome is made of wrought iron and not, as many people suppose, out of marble. One has to picture molten metal obliterating that morning’s deliberations of Congress, and within a few yards of the Supreme Court and of the spacious Thomas Jefferson room of the Library of Congress. The long-planned aggression might have been, and was fully intended to be, very much worse than it was. Meanwhile, surveying the cloud of noxious dust and pulverized human remains that enshrouded the lower part of my beloved Manhattan that sunlit morning, I wrote in a first-response article for a London paper that it was as though Charles Manson had been made king for a day.
Of the various later reactions, which included a suddenly exaggerated faith in a government that had demonstrated itself as almost inconceivably unfit for the elementary constitutional mandate of “securing the common defense,” as well as a paranoid subcultural spasm that immediately suspected government collusion with the attackers, a frequently heard one was a warning against demonizing “the Other.” On this reading, Osama bin Laden was not to be categorized with that simplistic (but somehow indispensable) word evil but was to be regarded in the light of a nemesis. In his words and actions we were supposed to detect a reproach to our contentment and arrogance, and a reminder that many millions of people lead lives of immiseration and oppression. His claim to speak for Islam or for all Muslims might be contested, but the religion itself was an expression of deeper yearnings that needed to be sympathetically understood. On no account—and this imperative was put forward by President Bush as well as by many liberals—were the less tender elements of his doctrine to be used as a critique of religion. A hitherto marginal propaganda term, “Islamophobia,” underwent a mainstream baptism and was pressed into service to intimidate those who suspected that faith might indeed have something to do with it.
It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or “objectify” them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like “Stalinism,” say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden’s writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
At the time, I wrote that the attacks on our civil society and institutions were an expression of “fascism with an Islamic face.” This involved a back reference to Alexander Dubček’s definition of Czechoslovak reformist communism as “socialism with a human face,” and to Susan Sontag’s echoing irony in calling martial law in communist Poland “fascism with a human face.” Obviously, these allusions can’t be preserved in every reiteration, and so a slightly vulgarized version—“Islamofascism”—got into the language and was briefly used by the White House before being dropped on the grounds of cultural sensitivity. (I have heard it argued that one would not blacken another monotheism in this way. Nonsense. In the 1930s the expression “clerical fascist” was in common use on the left, to describe the sympathy of the Vatican for reactionary and violent movements like those of General Franco in Spain, Ante Pavelić in Croatia, and Father Jozef Tiso in Slovakia. To this day, the papacy continues to struggle for a form of words that conveys an apology for its actions and inactions during that period.)
Overused as the term “fascism” may be, bin Ladenism has the following salient characteristics in common with it:
· It explicitly calls for the establishment of a totalitarian system, in which an absolutist code of primitive laws—most of them prohibitions—is enforced by a cruel and immutable authority, and by medieval methods of punishment. In this system, the private life and the autonomous individual have no existence. That this authority is theocratic or, in other words, involves the deification and sanctification of human control by humans makes it more tyrannical still.
· It involves the fetishization of one book as the sole source of legitimacy.
· It glorifies violence and celebrates death: Not since Franco’s General Quiepo de Llano uttered his slogan of “Death to the intellect: Long live death” has this emphasis been made more overt.
· It announces tha
t entire groups of people—“unbelievers,” Hindus, Shi’a Muslims, Jews—are essentially disposable and can be murdered more or less at will, or as a sacred duty.
· It relies on the repression of the sexual instinct, the criminalization of sexual “deviance,” and the utter subordination to chattel status—more extreme than in any fascist doctrine—of women.
· It has, as a central tenet, the theory of paranoid anti-Semitism and the belief in an occult Jewish world conspiracy. This manifests itself in the frequent recycling of the Russian czarist fabrication The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—once the property of the Christian anti-Semites—and, in bin Laden’s famous October 2002 “Letter to the Americans,” the published fantasy of a Jewish-controlled America that was first published by the homegrown American Nazi William Pelley in 1934.
These points in common are by no means exhaustive, but they do represent the most serious and determined and bloodthirsty attempt to revive totalitarian and racist ideology since 1945. For this reason, I always argued that the threat from bin Ladenism was actually greater than was often alleged, since the mass indoctrination of uneducated young men with such ideas is in itself a lethal danger to society and to international order. However, I also wanted to argue that the menace of bin Ladenism was simultaneously being overrated. This was because, in common with fascism, it was also delusional and self-defeating. Like the Nazis, the bin Ladenists dream of the restoration of a lost and glorious past, in their case in the form of the Ottoman Muslim caliphate that held spiritual and temporal sway over the Islamic world (and many non-Muslim subject populations) until 1918. Having gambled and lost everything on its proclamation of a holy war against Britain and France and Russia—in concert with German imperialism—in the First World War, the caliphate was formally dissolved by Kemal Atatürk in 1924. All subsequent attempts to revive it have been, and will continue to be, dismal failures. Not only does this program of reactionary imperial nostalgia make nonsense of the idea that al-Qaeda is in some way anti-imperialist, it also guarantees defeat in the real world. And al-Qaeda seeks not merely the return of the medieval status quo ante, as in the return of Andalusia to Islam, but its extension, as in the conquest of the whole of Spain. (The Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda murdered the United Nations envoy to Baghdad, Sérgio Viera de Melho, for the stated reason that he had earlier overseen the independence of East Timor from Indonesia: a grant of self-determination to a Christian population in a largely Muslim archipelago that was by definition profane and unpardonable.)
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the signature method and distinction of bin Ladenism is not so much the act of gratuitous and indiscriminate murder, lurid though that may be, as it is the commitment to suicide and the professed anxiety to make a bloody transition to the hereafter. Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other “races” according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.
This conclusion—that the long-run defeat of bin Ladenism is inscribed in its own doctrines and practices—does not mean that the attempt to inflict it is not extremely dangerous. (The more an attempt at Islamization fails, the more it blames Jews and Crusaders and the more it exports its violence.) But it does mean that we should stop describing its zealots as “radicals,” when what they represent is the most primeval form of conservatism. It also means that we should rid ourselves of the delusion that they represent a brown-skinned “Third World” revolt against an American-dominated world order or against, say, the injustice done to the Arabs of Palestine. Al-Qaeda actually began as an Asian organization, committed to wrenching out separate Islamist states from the territory of that continent’s two leading democracies: majority-Hindu India and the predominantly Christian Philippines. Since 2001 it has conducted repeated attacks on the newly democratized society of Indonesia, killing civilians in Bali and Jakarta with the express purpose of injuring the country’s tourist industry. It should go without saying that such policies are not even intended to combat poverty and unemployment. Rather, they have the effect of extending and deepening such problems—as is very probably the real intention. It should also go without saying that a state for Palestinians is brought no closer by the detonation of bombs at Madrid’s main railway station or by the demand that all of Iberia revert to Islamic rule.
I here make what I hope is not a digression from the main argument. If I am right that the defeat and discredit of bin Ladenism is inevitable, then it ought to follow that panic measures, or measures taken in fear, are even less justifiable. The resort to extralegal methods of interrogation, for example, or any want of care in protecting civilians from the consequences of military action, are not to be excused in any case. But when considered in historical or cultural context, where it will be seen that patience and skill and long engagement are the requisites, they reveal themselves as a double offense. (It’s a relatively paltry point by comparison, but in more than one of his broadcast sermons, notably the one transmitted on election eve in late October 2004, bin Laden does taunt the United States with its propensity for being stampeded into overreactions by even pin-prick attacks, and it is highly distasteful to think of this jeer being validated.)
Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states “to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that "those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.” In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden’s capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was “unarmed” when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its “operations” in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.
An old Spanish proverb has it that “no man is without his aspect of honor.” Having unambiguously said that bin Laden was the physical embodiment of an evil doctrine and a wicked set of actions, ought I not to inquire into whether there was a human pulse to be detected? Some element of redeeming idealism, conceivably, or at least some excuse or justification? I admit to having been struck, very early on, by a certain vague kind of nobility in his carriage and appearance. The widely spaced and liquid eyes, the long and fluted fingers, the relatively well-modulated voice: These are not typical of the hoarse, crude, brutal figures who lead the Taliban, say, or who organized the fantastically sadistic and homicidal so-called “insurgency” put together by the Jordanian jailbird and psychopath Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, founder of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. (This ghastly individual was awarded the Iraqi “franchise” by bin Laden in 2004, but it see
ms that his awful, unslakable thirst for the blood of Shi’a Muslims was considered slightly excessive by both bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Zawahiri.)
Michael Scheuer, the head of the special CIA unit that supervised the search for bin Laden, was reporting not just the views of his enemy’s devoted adherents when he made the comparison to “a modern-day Saladin.” In his own words he described him hyperbolically as having demonstrated “patience, brilliant planning, managerial expertise, sound strategic and tactical sense, admirable character traits, eloquence, and focused, limited war aims. He has never, to my knowledge, behaved or spoken in a way that could be described as ‘irrational in the extreme.’” Not content with this portion of the recognition that might be due to a formidable adversary, Scheuer went on to conclude that
“There is no reason, based on the information at hand, to believe bin Laden is anything other than what he appears: a pious, charismatic, gentle, generous, talented and personally courageous Muslim. As a historical figure, viewed from any angle, Osama bin Laden is a great man, one who smashed the expected unfolding of universal post–Cold War peace.”
How does this verdict read now that we can match it against a finished life: a life that ended with bin Laden as a cosseted pensioner of the Pakistani national-security state, apparently insulated from any fighting, watching replays of himself on video and dying his beard to conceal the onset of grayness? The small elements of vanity here may not be vestigial or insignificant, and should be borne in mind as we proceed.
Osama bin Laden was the only son of a Syrian woman, who was one of the more than twenty wives of Muhammed bin Laden, an uneducated Yemeni who grew rich as a contractor by gratifying the whims of the Saudi Arabian royal house. The marriage did not last long, and the father died when Osama was ten, leaving him as one of fifty-four children. In Christian folklore there is a saying that “In the boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed,” and it is not difficult to imagine the young man suffering from a lack of attention. He certainly fulfilled the more predictable part of the pattern of neglected youth by replicating it in his own private life. The best estimate of Jean Sasson’s book Growing Up bin Laden is that Osama was married five times and fathered “at least” 11 sons and 9 daughters. The coauthors of the book are his fourth son, Omar, and his first wife (and cousin), Najwa. Omar claims that his father encouraged him to take part in a suicide "mission," treating him with contempt when he declined. They recall lives of sequestration and loneliness, being locked into the house all day in the case of the children to being kept in strict purdah and isolation—forbidden even to step into the garden—in the case of the spouse. According to the accounts of neighbors, these were also the prevailing conditions in the walled villa provided by the Pakistani dictatorship in Abbottabad.