you knew that the road was full of thorns and mines…You renounced worldly pleasures with me—renounce them more after me. Do not think of remarrying and you need only to look after our children, make sacrifices, and pray for them.”
To his children, he wrote, “Forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have shouldered the Muslims’ concerns and the concerns of their hardships, embitterment, betrayal and treachery. If it was not for treachery, the situation would not be what it is now and the outcome would not be what it is now.”
He explicitly advised his children not to work with Al Qaeda. He cited the story of a Muslim leader, Omar Bin Al-Khattab, who forbid his son from becoming caliph, telling him, “If it is good, then we have had our share; if it is bad, then it is enough…”8
During his years in Sudan, as his family gradually disowned him, Osama’s writings sometimes rang with anger and frustration, but never before had a document attributed to him conveyed such despair and exhaustion. He had apparently assumed that the American military would quickly fall victim to a popular uprising by ordinary Afghans, as had occurred to the Soviet army after its invasion in 1979; instead, his allies in the Taliban had collapsed as the United States and its allies swept into every major Afghan city and town, and a number of his trusted compatriots in Al Qaeda had been killed or captured. If Osama imagined himself as the triumphant leader of a guerrilla vanguard, he now confronted the humiliating prospect of retreat, and the serious possibility that he would be killed or imprisoned.
The winter passed, however, and none of these fears materialized. By June 2002, Osama remained safe, and he had established a network of personal protection stable enough to allow him to return cautiously to jihad publishing and video production. His initial work that spring still expressed an unusual degree of self-pity; a jihadi Web site published a poetic exchange with his son Hamzah, evoking the conditions and causes of their shared exile:
“Oh father!” Hamzah wrote. “Where is the escape and when will we have a home? Oh father! I see spheres of danger everywhere I look. How come our home has vanished without a trace?…Why have they showered us with bombs like rain, having no mercy for a child?…Tell me, father, something useful about what I see.”
“Oh son!” Osama answered. “Suffice to say that I am full of grief and sighs. What can I say if we are living in a world of laziness and discontent…Pardon me, my son, but I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security has gone, but danger remains. It is a world of crimes in which children are slaughtered like cows. For how long will real men be in short supply?”9
NOT FOR LONG, as it happened. As the months passed, and still he remained free, Osama’s courage and confidence returned. The particular circumstances of his life as a fugitive are, as of this writing, unknown, but the open record of his published statements and recordings from exile during this period—more than a dozen altogether—makes plain the general trajectory of Osama’s experience: an initial period of giddy celebration immediately after the attacks on New York and Washington, followed by a rapid descent into desperation, and then a gradual recovery and a reawakened sense of purpose, producing a return to the ambition and boastfulness of his past. Osama’s statements make clear, too, that by 2003, at least, he enjoyed regular access to satellite television and the Internet.
Planning for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, more than any other event, seemed to draw Osama back to himself; judging by what he said and wrote, the war arrived as a kind of spiritual and political elixir, just when he required it most. The buildup to combat early in 2003 brought forth a burst of lengthy and ambitious writing, essays that harkened to his prolific period of pamphleteering from Sudan. After a period of quietude and anguish, suddenly Osama seemed to have much that he wished to say.
“I am rejoicing in the fact that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates,” he wrote in October 2003. “Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits, by the grace of God Almighty. Here is America today, screaming at the top of its voice as it falls apart in front of the whole world.”10
Osama saw the Iraq war as “a rare and essentially valuable chance in every sense of the word to mobilize the
Osama made no secret of his disdain for Saddam Hussein, but this, of course, could not justify the American occupation, he said: “It is true that Saddam is a thief and an apostate, but the solution is not to be found in moving the government of Iraq from a local thief to a foreign one.” When the United States announced increases in the reward money available for his capture or death, Osama retaliated by announcing his own reward schedule, in units of gold, for the murder of Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, as well as for the deaths of other Americans.12
He seemed to particularly cherish the rhetoric of transformation in the Middle East enunciated by Bush and his cabinet. Their formulations about a “new” Arab world, anchored by a secular, democratic constitution in Iraq, confirmed Osama’s belief that he was engaged in an epochal conflict. The occupation of Iraq “shows that the struggle is an ideological and religious struggle, and that the clash is a clash of civilizations,” he wrote in May 2004. “They are keen to destroy the Islamic identity in the entire Islamic world.”13
He mocked his Western adversaries for misunderstanding him as a premodern fanatic, a bearded loner in a faraway cave; he saw himself, instead, as a master of global technology and change. Indeed, after 2001, encouraged by Bin Laden’s embrace of digital technology, Al Qaeda—now an organization, a movement, and a franchised brand—rapidly adapted itself to the loss of physical sanctuary in Afghanistan by making greater use of the Internet for training, tactical communication, and preaching. When American officials suggested that some of Osama’s self-produced videos might contain secret codes to trigger terrorist attacks by sleeper cells, Bin Laden reacted to these fears with contempt. “The Americans have made laughable claims,” he said. “They said that there are hidden messages intended for terrorists in Bin Laden’s statements. It is as if we are living in a time of carrier pigeons, without the existence of telephones, without travelers, without the Internet, without regular mail, without faxes, without e-mail. This is just farcical; words that belittle people’s intellects.”14
One of his most remarkable essays, published as preparations for the invasion of Iraq were under way, presented a list of grievances—numbered and subnumbered into categories—that described the fullness of his opposition to the United States, its foreign policies, and its national values. The essay suggested that Osama had been perusing American news magazines during the long hours of his exile and had grown frustrated by the typical analysis he read of his motivations. “Some American writers have published articles under the title ‘On what basis are we fighting?’…Here we wanted to outline the truth.” He posed two essential questions: “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” and “What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?”15
The answer to the first question, he wrote, “is very simple: 1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.” He listed the venues where he perceived these attacks: Palestine, Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Lebanon. “You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”
As to the second question, his essential war aims, “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam.” Americans should convert to the “seal of all previous religions” in order to rescue themselves from a profound state of debauchery:
We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury…You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider these acts to be pillars of personal freedom…Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he “made a mistake,” after which everything passed with no punishment…You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them…You then rant that you support the liberation of women.16
The more idle time Osama spent as a fugitive, the more hours he watched satellite television or perused Web sites for news of the world outside, the more he seemed to internalize and synthesize, in a characteristic
