The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [188]
But there was no American response. The country was in the middle of a presidential election, and Clinton was trying to burnish his legacy by securing a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. The Cole bombing had occurred just as the talks were falling apart. Clinton maintains that, despite the awkward political timing, his administration came close to launching another missile attack against bin Laden that October, but at the last minute the CIA recommended calling it off because his presence at the site was not completely certain.
Bin Laden was angry and disappointed. He hoped to lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds. It had happened to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union. He was certain it would happen to America. The declaration of war, the strike on the American embassies, and now the bombing of the Cole had been inadequate, however, to provoke a massive retaliation. He would have to create an irresistible outrage.
One can ask, at this point, whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it. The answer is certainly not. Indeed, the tectonic plates of history were, shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest. The international Salafist uprising might have occurred without the writings of Sayyid Qutb or Abdullah Azzam’s call to jihad, but al-Qaeda would not have existed. Al-Qaeda depended on a unique conjunction of personalities, in particular the Egyptians—Zawahiri, Abu Ubaydah, Saif al-Adl, and Abu Hafs—each of whom manifested the thoughts of Qutb, their intellectual father. But without bin Laden, the Egyptians were only al-Jihad. Their goals were parochial. At a time when there were many Islamist movements, all of them concentrated on nationalist goals, it was bin Laden’s vision to create an international jihad corps. It was his leadership that held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile. It was bin Laden’s tenacity that made him deaf to the moral quarrels that attended the murder of so many and indifferent to the repeated failures that would have destroyed most men’s dreams. All of these were qualities that one can ascribe to a cult leader or a madman. But there was also artistry involved, not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required.
19
The Big Wedding
SOCIAL EVENTS WERE RARE in the al-Qaeda community, but bin Laden was in the mood to celebrate. He arranged a marriage between his seventeen-year-old son, Mohammed, and Abu Hafs’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Khadija. She was a quiet, unlettered girl, and the women wondered what she and Mohammed would have to say to each other. They could just imagine the surprises that awaited her on her wedding night, since sexual matters were rarely discussed, especially with children.
For the occasion bin Laden had taken over a large hall—a former movie theater on the outskirts of Kandahar that had been gutted by the Taliban—to accommodate the five hundred men in attendance. (The women were in a separate facility with the young bride.) He began the festivities by reading a long poem, apologizing that it was not his own work,