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| The Looming Tower - Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 |
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By: Wright, Lawrence
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ISBN: 071399973X
Publisher: Allen Lane
Weight: 0
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WERE it not for Osama bin Laden, an Arab eccentric with heretical religious beliefs who was little known beyond a clique of kindred fanatics, drifters, crooks and journalists, the attacks of September 11th 2001 would not have happened—and neither, perhaps, would the war on terror.
That might sound remarkable. America and a few allies have so expanded the war, to encompass the bombing of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, that Mr bin Laden is no longer their prime target. There are also those who view the war as a civilisational clash between the West and the Muslim world, with Mr bin Laden a mere catalyst in it. Lawrence Wright, a writer for the New Yorker, will have none of this: if history changed course as the twin towers crumbled, he argues, Mr bin Laden was the single main reason why.
America had seen previous Islamist attacks. But most Islamist terrorists were parochial in their aims, attached to struggling nationalist movements in Muslim countries. The genius of Mr bin Laden—his “artistry”, according to Mr Wright—was in uniting these fractious movements into an international jihad corps, al-Qaeda. By persuading its members to kill themselves in their attacks—a key difference from an earlier Islamist strike against the World Trade Centre, in 1993—Mr bin Laden and his lieutenants increased their effectiveness, and the group's cultish allure. If a period of conflict between the liberal and Muslim worlds had long been on the cards, Mr Wright suggests, “the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest.”
The first of these was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian fundamentalist intellectual hanged by a military government in 1966. Qutb's ideas, including on the inevitability of a civilisational clash, gave intellectual credence to the biggest nationalist movement, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. They also influenced two men who were supposedly Mr bin Laden's greatest mentors: Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who preached global holy war while fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan; and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian former member of the Brotherhood, who introduced the tactic of suicide-bombing to al-Qaeda. And then there was Mr bin Laden himself, a character too enigmatic to be easily imagined. An ascetic with a multi-million-dollar inheritance and a flair for business, a devoted father who incited mass murder, a humble student of the Koran who may be history's most successful self-publicist, he is cloaked in contradictions which Mr Wright manfully tries to unpick.
Much of the enigma, he shows, was created by Mr bin Laden himself. A typical example of his mythologising concerns his part in the Afghan jihad. It is well known that the American-funded holy war radicalised Mr bin Laden and a whole generation of Arab youths. According to Saudi intelligence estimates, up to 25,000 Saudis took part, and Mr bin Laden, who established the first camp for Arab fighters, was their biggest private fund-raiser. But only a small minority of these fighters actually fought, and even then badly. Mr bin Laden, who admitted to being too scared to visit the fighting on his first trips to Afghanistan, was quite typical. He achieved almost nothing on the battlefield other than a string of calamities including the massacre of 80 of his Arab fighters by pro-Soviet Afghan troops. Yet the glorious terms in which he described such mishaps recast them as victories for religious devotion and sacrifice.
Mr Wright offers not much new information on his subject—and perhaps nothing that is incontrovertible. Instead, he has sought to write the most comprehensive, objective and readable guide to al-Qaeda's emergence. He scores quite well on each count, having produced a concise history coloured by many enjoyable anecdotes. For example, we read of Mr bin Laden boasting that his prize sunflower should be in the “Guinness Book of Records”, while he was living in Sudan in the early 1990s—a time when al-Qaeda “had become largely an agricultural organisation”. But such reports should be enjoyed more than trusted: the truth is that much about Mr bin Laden is still uncertain, with creditable estimates of his wealth varying by many millions of dollars—and even of his height by up to five inches. No history of al-Qaeda can be other than a version of the truth.
Yet this is still a worthy effort to retrieve Mr bin Laden from the shadows. After all, overstretched Western intelligence agencies, which are tied up with trying to cope with many other threats in the Islamic world, seem to know little more about him than Mr Wright does. That must be most encouraging to Mr bin Laden, whose stated aim was to bring America into conflict with Muslims, along “a large-scale front which it cannot contain”.
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