he last time I saw Osama bin Laden was in a tent on a mountaintop camp
in Afghanistan last year. A few meters away was a twenty-five-foot-high
air raid shelter cut into the rock, a relic of bin Laden's days fighting
the Soviet Army, but bombproof against even a cruise missile. bin Laden
had entered the tent in his white Saudi robes, shaken hands with me and
sat cross-legged on the rug, when he noticed that I had the latest
Beirut daily newspapers in my bag. He seized upon them and pored over
their pages for almost half an hour, one of his Arab mujahedeen in
Afghan clothes holding a sputtering gas lamp over the papers. Carefully,
bin Laden read the news from Iran, from his own country, from the
Israel-occupied West Bank. Was it true, he asked me, that Iran was
making a diplomatic démarche to Saudi Arabia?
As I sat there watching the man who had declared a "holy war" against
the United States a year earlier--the man who was supposedly the
"mastermind of world terrorism"--I reflected that he didn't seem to
know much about the world he was supposedly terrorizing. A Saudi who
regards the leadership of his country with contempt, he had told me at a
previous meeting in 1996, "If liberating my land is called terrorism,
this is a great honor for me."
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But not as great as the honor bestowed on him by President Clinton in
the aftermath of the American missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan
last month. "America's Public Enemy Number One"--Clinton's infantile
description of bin Laden--must have appealed to a man whose simple view
of the world is as politically naïve as it is dangerous. Last year, upon
that remote mountaintop amid the snow--so cold that there was ice in my
hair when I awoke in the tent before dawn--bin Laden had seemed an
isolated, almost lonely figure, largely ignored by a United States that
was still obsessed with the "evil" Saddam Hussein.
Clinton has changed all that. By endowing bin Laden with his new title,
he has given the Saudi dissident what he sought: recognition as the
greatest enemy of Western "corruption," the leader of all resistance
against US policy in the Middle East.
It would be funny if it weren't so tragic, the way America now treats
its opponents as if they were Hollywood bandits. It was Oliver North who
branded Palestinian killer Abu Nidal America's Public Enemy Number One.
Saddam was compared to Hitler, even though Saddam hero-worships the
memory of Stalin. Before that, when Saddam was one of our guys, busy
invading Iran, we had demonized the Ayatollah Khomeini. Libya's Muammar
el-Qaddafi was described by Ronald Regan as "that mad dog of the Middle
East." Even Yasir Arafat was a super-terrorist until his support for
Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait rendered him weak enough to
make peace with Israel--at which point we turned him in to a
super-statesman.
I doubt if Osama bin Laden understands the hierarchy of US hate
figures--or whether he would care if he did. The Afghan conflict against
the Soviets molded him, taught him the meaning of his religion, made him
think. "What I lived in two years there," he told me, "I could not have
lived in a hundred years elsewhere." When he brought his 9,000 Arab
fighters to support the Afghans in their conflict against the Soviet
occupation army, hacking out the mountain trails with his construction
equipment, building hospitals and arms dumps, he became a war hero. Some
of his current Afghan fellow fighters had been trained earlier by the
CIA in the very camps that were the target of the recent US missiles--but
whereas they had been called camps for "freedom fighters" when US agents
set them up in the early eighties, now they had become camps for
"terrorists." He and his comrades never saw "evidence of American help"
in Afghanistan, he told me, but he must have been aware of the CIA's
presence.
When I first met bin Laden, in the desert north of Khartoum in 1993
where he was building roads for isolated villages--and, so the Egyptians
were claiming, training Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's Islamist
enemies in the same Sudanese desert--I persuaded him to talk about the
effect of the Russian war.