BIN LADEN BIOGRAPHY RAISES DOUBTS
Mark N. Katz: 10/27/01

Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America by Yossef Bodansky 439 pp., $17.95 (paper) New York: Prima Publishing, 1999, 2001

First published some two years before the September 11 attacks, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America appears to have been highly prescient. This is particularly true of Bodansky's portrayal of how bin Laden and his network are seeking to drive America out of the Muslim world - especially Saudi Arabia - through acts of "spectacular terrorism." There are, however, several important problems with the book.

Bodansky traces Osama bin Laden's journey from son of a rags-to-riches Saudi construction magnate to anti-Soviet mujahid in Afghanistan in the 1980s, his subsequent break with the Saudi monarchy in the early 1990s over its decision to allow American forces into the Kingdom after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, his activities in Sudan until 1996, and his activities in Afghanistan since then.

What emerges - in addition to a portrait of an individual determined to expel American and other non-Muslim influences from the Muslim world - is a detailed description of the extraordinary network operating throughout the Muslim world, the West and elsewhere that bin Laden and his associates have built up to pursue this aim. The author goes on to argue that bin Laden's endeavors have received crucial support from several governments, including Afghanistan's Taliban, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran and Iraq.

This is a serious claim. Much of the research supporting it, Bodansky writes in his introductory "Note on Sources and Methods," is based on "extensive interviews and communications with numerous officials, mujahideen, terrorists, commanders, emitters, defectors, and otherwise involved individuals from all sides of these events" (p. xxi). He also made use of "large quantities of open sources-primarily regional media" (p. xxi). He then states that "precise source noting is inadvisable…because the safety and survival of the human sources is most important" (p. xxii). This certainly seems fair enough when it comes to interviews or other private communications. But Bodansky then goes on to state that he will not cite open sources either, out of concern that doing so will enable hostile intelligence services to more readily judge what he obtained from human sources, as well as who provided it.

This is a problem because Bodansky makes some fairly amazing claims, and the lack of sourcing makes it impossible to judge their credibility. Throughout the book, Bodansky portrays bin Laden not as the central figure directing a jihad against America, but as "a cog, albeit an important one, in a large system that will outlast his own demise-state-sponsored international terrorism" (p. 406).

On p. 72, for example, Bodansky claims that the 1993 escalation of attacks against American forces in Somalia "was the first manifestation of a strategic alliance between Iran, Iraq, and Sudan." He does not, however, provide a convincing account of how Iraq and Iran went from being at war with each other between 1980 and 1988 to being strategic allies by 1993. Most observers believe that Iraq and Iran still view each other as adversaries, not allies.

Bodansky later argues that in order to make gains against his rivals within the Saudi royal family, "Prince Abdallah urged [Syrian President] Assad to expedite the implementation of their joint designs for a wave of low-level anti-American terrorism in Saudi Arabia" (p. 166), which led to the June 25, 1996 explosion that killed nineteen Americans.

Those who do research on Saudi Arabia know that trying to obtain information about the inner workings of the royal family is extremely difficult. There are all kinds of rumors which swirl around about this subject. Bodansky, though, has reported one of these rumors as if it were fact without any qualification.

Bodansky even accuses the Clinton Administration of aiding the Islamist cause in 1997 by recounting how a shadowy Muslim figure made a secret offer to one of bin Laden's associates: "The United States would not interfere with or intervene to prevent the Islamists' rise to power in Egypt if the Islamist mujahideen currently in Bosnia-Herzegovina would refrain from attacking the U.S. forces there" (pp. 212-13). Once the Mubarak government got wind of this, Bodansky claims that it entered into "strategic cooperation" with Iraq, Iran, and Syria in early 1998 (p. 218). Both of these reports are extremely farfetched.

The book is replete with these sort of claims. The basic message appears to be that a whole host of important Muslim actors-including those in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and both the secular and Islamist Palestinian movements-support bin Laden to a greater or lesser extent.

If this is the case, why is it that Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have supported the United States in its conflict with bin Laden since September 11? Why is it that Iran has not sided with him, but has tried to remain neutral, even offering humanitarian aid to the US-led forces? Why has Yasser Arafat expressed sympathy for the United States and sought to suppress Palestinian expressions of support for bin Laden?

The truth of the matter is that bin Laden does not have the level of support from these actors that Bodansky claims he has. All of them, including Saddam Hussein in Iraq, know full well that if bin Laden succeeded in getting the United States to withdraw from the Middle East, he would not leave them be. His associates have denounced Saddam for his secular Arab nationalism. The Iranian clerics know that his Sunni movement is virulently anti-Shi'a. Nor would he leave the present Saudi, Egyptian, or Palestinian leaderships intact. The fact that the Pakistani government is cooperating so closely with the United States indicates that it sees bin Laden's activities as a threat to their interests too. Even Islamist Sudan is cooperating with Washington.

In his zeal to warn us about the threat we face from bin Laden, Bodansky portrays the Muslim world as monolithically united against us. This reminds me of the type of analysis that was highly prevalent during the Cold War, analysis that described the communist bloc as both monolithic and firmly under Moscow's control. There were even those at that time who saw the Sino-Soviet rift and other public disputes between communists as hoaxes meant to lull the West into complacency. Today, we need to take care not to fall into this trap. We need to be aware that, while many Muslim actors are admittedly anti-American, this does not mean that there are not serious differences among them.

As the events of September 11 have shown, bin Laden is a serious threat and an accurate understanding of him and his network is a necessity. Exaggerating the unity and power of the forces behind him and not paying sufficient attention to the important differences among various Muslim actors, though, does not help us in undertaking this vitally important task.

Editor's Note: Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University.

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