Osama Bin Laden

On March 10, 2011 Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden will celebrate his 54th birthday. He once organized and funded moderately useful Arab aid to Afghan freedom fighters against the USSR. When Saudi civil and religious leaders turned down his offer of assistance to prevent Iraq from moving beyond Kuwait into Saudi Arabia, a seismic shift in Osama's thinking became notable. For, too diffident regarding an all-Arab resistance, the Kingdom then invited infidel American armed forces into the birthland of the prophet Mohammed. *** Osama then declared a defensive war (jihad) on the USA with three stated aims: (1) to drive the USA to the brink of bankruptcy; (2) to spread American forces so thin across numerous theaters as to leave virtually no strategic reserves and (3) both to peel off international support for America and also to stir up domestic opposition within the USA to US government intervention in the Islamic world. *** Author Michael Scheuer stresses that Osama bin Laden's great historical model as a devout Muslim champion of Islam is Saladin (c. 1138 - 1193). Saladin's anti-Crusader war became the model of a defensive jihad: use of military force to repel infidels from lands once conquered by Muslims. To Osama a defensive jihad is a moral command from Allah, a sixth pillar of Islam, a far too long neglected religious obligation. Defensive jihad does not, according to Scheuer, aim at rapid conquest of the entire world, but merely at recovering lands lost to Islam, especially Israel but also Spain. *** According to the book's cover blurb, "Michael Scheuer was the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and remained a counterterrorism analyst until 2004." He has written a number of related books. -OOO-