The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [101]
The plight of the Palestinians, the rise and rise of Israel, and America’s consistent support of Israel preoccupied bin Laden from very early on. His mother has recalled him, as a teenager, being “concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular.” It was essential, bin Laden said even then, “to reclaim Palestine.”
By the mid-1980s, bin Laden was already speaking out publicly about boycotting American products. He would not drink Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or 7-Up, or allow his children to drink such beverages. “The Americans take our money,” he recalled saying, “and give it to the Jews so that they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” “Our” children, because Palestinians were fellow Arabs, part of the wider Arab community. He was to raise the Palestine issue and excoriate American support for Israel time and again—until as recently as 2009.
The 1982 Israeli assault on Lebanon, bin Laden said after 9/11, made a lasting impression on him. “America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon,” he declared. “They started bombing, killing and wounding many.… I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred.… It was like a crocodile devouring a child, who could do nothing but scream.… The whole world heard and saw what happened, but did nothing.”
It was then, bin Laden asserted, that something like 9/11 first occurred to him. He watched, presumably on television, as Israel bombarded the high-rise apartment blocks that housed many Palestinians in Beirut. “The idea came to me,” he asserted, “when things went just too far with the American-Israeli alliance’s oppression and atrocities against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.… As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would get a taste of its own medicine.”
“The events of Manhattan,” he would say on an audiotaped message broadcast after 9/11, “were retaliation against the American-Israeli alliance’s aggression against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.”
PERHAPS SO. While he was still the hero home from the war, though, a further grievance against the United States arose on his home territory—one that, for bin Laden and many other Saudis—loomed at least as large as Palestine.
NINETEEN
IN AUGUST 1990, OSAMA BIN LADEN STOCKED UP ON FOOD SUPPLIES, candles, gas masks, and portable communications equipment. In the event of the need for a quick getaway, he had a more powerful engine fitted to the boat he kept at the family marina. At home, he got his sons to help him cover the windows with adhesive tape. The tape, he explained, was in case of bombing, to protect the family from broken glass.
Bombing was a possibility. Saddam Hussein’s army had overrun neighboring Kuwait and appeared poised to push on into Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden despised the Iraqi president, whom he considered an unbeliever. Saddam, he predicted, “will attack Saudi Arabia for possession of the oilfields in the eastern province.”
Oil was what mattered, the one thing that really mattered, to all the nations involved. It was the only reason, certainly, that Saudi Arabia had ever mattered to the Americans. “The defense of Saudi Arabia,” President Franklin Roosevelt had said back in 1943, “is vital to the defense of the United States.” Half a century on and within twenty-four hours of the Iraqi invasion, the first President Bush now made a promise. “If you ask for help from the United States,” he told Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, “we will go all the way with you.”
Four days later, at King Fahd’s seaside palace in Jeddah, a senior U.S. delegation told the monarch what a request for help would mean. Some 300,000 Iraqi troops and almost three thousand tanks were threatening the border. To drive them back and throw them out of Kuwait, General Norman Schwarzkopf