fashion, diverse strands of anti-American grievance, whether they had originated with the European left, the Christian right, or the anti-globalization movement. He valued rhetorical effect over consistency of argument. His lines of poetry might be labored and archaic, but from time to time, he could turn a memorable sentence. Describing his impervious defiance in the name of Islam, he wrote: “The swimmer in the sea does not fear rain.”17 When he was not elegant, he was at least clear: “The freedom and democracy that you call for is for yourselves and for the white race only,” he wrote. “As for the rest of the world, you impose upon it your monstrous, destructive policies and governments, which you call ‘friends of America.’”18
He often blended these secular-tinted criticisms of the United States with the millenarian and anti-Semitic creeds that had long been at the heart of his outlook. Throughout his essays and recordings, like many Arabians, Osama presumed the power and relentlessness of Zionist and Jewish conspiracies.
“America didn’t start by taking my money and didn’t hurt me personally at all,” he conceded, “but it made claims about me as a result of our incitement against the Jews and the Americans…The government will take the American people and the West in general into a choking life, into an unsupportable hell, because of the fact that it has very strong ties with and are under the payroll of the Zionist lobby.” He described Jews in dehumanizing terms, “the idiots of the age,” who, when confronted by righteous Palestinian youth, “have become like agitated wild asses fleeing from a lion.”19
He rejected the borders of many nation-states as illegitimate lines drawn by pagan colonialists, yet he retained an emotional identification with the particular country of his youth—no longer as a “Saudi,” a word that honored the hated Al-Saud family, but rather as a “Hejazi,” a son of the land of Mecca and Medina. “I miss my country greatly, and have long been absent from it; but this is easy to endure because it is for the sake of God,” he wrote in late 2004. “Love for the Hejaz is deep in my heart, but its rulers are wolves.”20
By now he forswore almost all his earlier sympathy for Crown Prince Abdullah, soon to become king, although he suggested that Abdullah was a victim, to some extent, of American blackmail. Many had believed, Osama wrote, “that when Prince Abdullah…took over management of the country, he would save it from the mires of religious disobedience, and administrative, financial and media corruption…and that he would save it from subservience to America. But although people were expecting good to come from him, he brought them evil.”21
As yet more months passed and he still remained at large, and as Al Qaeda steadily revitalized itself and supported prominent attacks in London and elsewhere, Osama expressed open pride in what he had achieved since 2001. He had long thought of himself not as the general of an Islamic army or the self-anointed ruler of a prospective caliphate, but as the vanguard of a much broader and looser Islamic political resistance, in which his own band of violent operators would play no more than a galvanizing role. The September 11 attacks, he now concluded, had served to “demonstrate the enormous hostility that the Crusaders feel towards us” and had “revealed the American wolf in its true ugliness.”22
For the future, he promised a patient, long-term guerrilla strategy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, punctuated by occasional “raids,” or terrorism, on Western territory: “The balance of terror has evened out.” He wanted to “underline the importance of dragging the enemy forces into a protracted, exhausting, close combat, making the most of camouflaged defense positions…Further, we emphasize the importance of martyrdom operations which have inflicted unprecedented harm on America and Israel, thanks to God Almighty.” He retained a considerable interest in nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, which he had once referred to as “war winners.”23
In January 2006, apparently provoked once again by watching Bush on satellite television, Osama issued an audiotaped statement, which would be his last communique for a prolonged period.
“I had not intended to speak to you about this issue,” he began. “However, what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush, in his comment on the outcome of the U.S. opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq—but he objected to this desire, and said that the withdrawal of troops would send a wrong message to the enemy. Bush said: It is better to fight them on their ground than they fighting us on our ground.” This rhetoric, although mainly intended for domestic political audiences in the United States, plainly infuriated Osama:
Reality testifies that the war against America and its allies has not remained confined to Iraq, as he claims. In fact, Iraq has become a point of attraction and recruitment of qualified resources. On the other hand, the
Osama then issued a warning:
As for the delay in carrying out similar operations in America, this was not due to failure to breach your security measures. Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished, God willing.
As for himself, he said, “I swear not to die but a free man.”24
He fell into a long silence. On the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda’s revived media operation, Al-Sahab, or “The Clouds,” delivered a new videotape in which Osama donned a gold formal robe and read out a political essay to a single fixed camera. The images were blurry, but his eyes appeared a little baggy— hardly surprising for a man now almost fifty years old living under conditions that presumably carried some stress. The most striking aspects of his appearance reflected his unembarrassed middle-aged vanity: Since his last video, he had trimmed his long beard to a rounded shape and dyed its gray streaks black.
His speech again synthesized disparate and not particularly religious anti-American critiques. He managed to praise both Noam Chomsky, the linguist and ardently left-wing intellectual, and Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst whose professional life had once been devoted to killing him, because both men denounced in books they had recently published the business-influenced imperial strains in American foreign policy. Osama seemed clearly to be hiding in or near Pakistan, or somewhere else where English books were readily available, as he appeared to be using the considerable time on his hands to read in English, advancing the linguistic training he had first acquired from Irish and British instructors at the Al-Thaghr school. He also seemed, as before, to be watching and reading English-language news. Western media aggravated him: they were often worse “than the condition of the media of the dictatorial regimes which march in the caravan of the single leader,” a view that also placed him in the company of many Western leftists.
Yet when Osama watched American or British television, sequestered in his hideaway, he now gazed into a flattering mirror—the media might distort his image, but they also depicted him as one of the most pervasive and powerful political figures on earth. Through the events of September 11, and their cascading aftermath, he now considered himself the author of this singular achievement, as an instrument of Allah. America might be “the greatest economic power” and “the major state influencing the policies of the world,” and yet by recruiting nineteen young men to fly as suicide pilots and bodyguards, Osama had achieved the improbable: He had “changed the direction of its compass.”25
This was Osama in his later exile: A man who, although relatively young, lived continuously close to death, and who worried, considering the short time he might have left, about how he might be remembered. His speeches were political and religious oratory of a now familiar type, but his lines also seemed intended to draft or at least influence the themes of his own posthumous reputation. Osama lacked a valid passport. He spoke in a Saudi accent but had been stripped—and had stripped himself—of conventional Saudi identity, and he was almost certainly living, at least some of the time, in an area of western Pakistan that lacked a recognizable government. In this denationalized condition, he chose wardrobes and props for his video statements that suggested three overlapping strands of self-imagining: the formal gowns of a religious scholar; the assault rifle of a modern jihadi warrior; and the traditional dagger of his Hadhrami origins.
A century before, British colonial officers had struggled to understand the global Hadhrami diaspora from which the Bin Laden family and its wayward son later arose; the Hadhramis’ mobile and independent networks eluded or surprised the empire’s census takers because they spilled across diverse political territory, often indifferent to the border posts of imperial mapmakers. Osama constructed his life as a political fugitive after
