The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [90]
“There are no caves in Kuwait,” the prince observed. “What will you do when he lobs missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?”
“We will fight him with faith,” bin Laden responded.
Bin Laden also made his presentation to Prince Turki. He was one of the few princes who had agreed with bin Laden’s assessment of Saddam as a threat to the Kingdom; in fact, over the years, Turki had made several proposals to the CIA about removing Saddam through covert means, but each time he was spurned. When the invasion of Kuwait occurred, Turki had been in Washington, D.C., on vacation. He was in a theater watching Die Hard 2 when he was summoned to the White House. He spent the rest of the night at the Central Intelligence Agency, helping to coordinate the campaign to repel the Iraqis from Kuwait. In his opinion, if Saddam were allowed to stay in Kuwait, he would enter the Kingdom at the slightest provocation.
So when bin Laden approached him with his plan, Turki was taken aback by the naïveté of the young Afghan veteran. There were only fifty-eight thousand men in the entire Saudi army. Iraq, on the other hand, had a standing army of nearly a million men—the fourth-largest army in the world—not counting its reserves and paramilitary forces. Saddam’s armored corps counted 5,700 tanks, and his Republican Guards included the most fearsome and well-trained divisions in the Middle East. That did not impress bin Laden. “We pushed the Soviets out of Afghanistan,” he said.
The prince laughed in disbelief. For the first time, he was alarmed by the “radical changes” he saw in bin Laden’s personality. He had gone from being “a calm, peaceful and gentle man” whose only goal was to help Muslims, to being “a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance and his haughtiness.”
SPURNED BY THE GOVERNMENT, bin Laden turned to the clergy for support. His case against American assistance rested on the Prophet’s remark, as he lay dying, “Let there be no two religions in Arabia.” The meaning of this remark has been disputed ever since it was uttered. Prince Turki argued that the Prophet meant only that no other religion should dominate the peninsula. Even during the Prophet’s lifetime, he pointed out, Jews and Christians were traveling through Arabia. It was not until 641 C.E., the twentieth year of the Muslim calendar, that Caliph Omar began removing the indigenous Christians and Jews from some parts of Arabia. They were resettled in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Since then, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina have been off-limits for non-Muslims. To bin Laden and many other Islamists, that wasn’t enough. They believed that the Prophet’s deathbed injunction is clear: All non-Muslims should be expelled from the entire peninsula.
Nonetheless, recognizing the danger that the foreign troops posed to their legitimacy, the Saudi government pressured the clergy to issue a fatwa endorsing the invitation of non-Muslim armies into the Kingdom on the excuse that they were defending Islam. This would give the government the religious cover it needed. Bin Laden furiously confronted the senior clerics. “This is inadmissible,” he told them.
“My son Osama, we cannot discuss this issue because we are afraid,” one of the sheikhs replied, pointing to his neck and indicating that his head would be cut off if he talked about the matter.
Within weeks, half a million American GIs streamed into the Kingdom, creating what many Saudis feared would be a permanent occupation. Although the Americans—and other coalition forces—were stationed mainly outside the cities in order to stay out of view, Saudis were mortified by the need to turn to Christians and Jews to defend the holy land of Islam. That many of these foreign soldiers were women only added to their embarrassment. The weakness