The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [86]
Bin Laden gave them a history lesson. “America went to Vietnam, thousands of miles away, and began bombing them in planes. The Americans did not get out of Vietnam until after they suffered great losses. Over sixty thousand American soldiers were killed until there were demonstrations by the American people. The Americans won’t stop their support of Jews in Palestine until we give them a lot of blows. They won’t stop until we do jihad against them.”
There he stood, on the threshold of advocating violence against the United States, but he suddenly stopped himself. “What is required is to wage an economic war against America,” he continued. “We have to boycott all American products…. They’re taking the money we paythem for their products and giving it to the Jews to kill our brothers.” The man who had made his name in combat against the Soviets now invoked Mahatma Gandhi, who brought down the British Empire “by boycotting its products and wearing non-Western clothes.” He urged a public-relations campaign. “Any American we see, we should notify of our complaints,” bin Laden meekly concluded. “We should write to American embassies.”
BIN LADEN WOULD LATER SAY that the United States had always been his enemy. He dated his hatred for America to 1982, “when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them.” He recalled the carnage: “blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents…. The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams.” This scene provoked an intense desire to fight tyranny, he said, and a longing for revenge. “As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted.”
His actions at the time belied this public stance. Privately, bin Laden approached members of the royal family during the Afghan jihad to express his gratitude for American participation in that war. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, remembered bin Laden coming to him and saying, “Thank you. Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us get rid of the secularist, atheist Soviets.”
Bin Laden had never shown himself to be an interesting or original political thinker—his analysis, until then, was standard Islamist boilerplate, uninformed by any deep experiences in the West. And yet, wrapped in the mystique that had been spun around him, bin Laden held a position in Saudi society that gave weight to his pronouncements. The very fact that his American critique was being uttered at all—in a country where speech was so curtailed—suggested to other Saudis that there must be royal consent behind the anti-American campaign that bin Laden had launched.
Few countries in the world were so different from each other, and yet so dependent on one another, as America and Saudi Arabia. Americans built the Saudi petroleum industry; American construction companies, such as Bechtel, built much of the country’s infrastructure; Howard Hughes’s company, Trans World Airlines, built the Saudi passenger air service; the Ford Foundation modernized Saudi government; the U.S. Corps of Engineers built the country’s television and broadcast facilities and oversaw the development of its defense industry. Meantime, Saudi Arabia sent its top students to American universities—more than thirty thousand per year during the 1970s