Agreeing with Osama Bin Laden

A vulnerability exists in individuals who equate sympathy with an enemy's grievances as disloyalty. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could use it to minimize resistance to foreign policy decisions that result in injustices.

Shortly after September 11, Osama Bin Laden sat down and wrote a Letter to the American People in which he responded to the question so many Americans were asking at the time - simply, "Why?"


The resulting letter covers a lot of ground from US foreign policy in the middle east to the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, but the central grievance and the one which he used to justify the September 11 attacks concerns the long-standing US support for Israel in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Terrorist organisations possess clearly articulated motives and complex philosophical underpinnings, but there is a reluctance to acknowledge them on the part of their enemies. Indeed, expressing any kind of empathy towards suicide bombers is politically unacceptable as Cherie Blair discovered when she was forced to apologise for saying publicly of the Israel-Palestinian issue, "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress" [source]. The very suggestion that suicide bombers feel their grievances are legitimate is seen as insensitive to their victims or as justifying this kind of violence. Politicians are instead forced to dismiss the motives of such people as if they spring from a well of inherent 'evil' or pure insanity.

But it is clear that the men and women who strap bombs to themselves or who fly planes into buildings believe very strongly in the righteousness of their cause. They are after all, sacrificing their own lives and believe that God will reward them for doing so. Like them, Bin Laden strongly believed he was fighting a noble fight and to refuse to engage in the war of ideas would be to allow his views to go unchecked and infect the minds of others who could follow in his footsteps. Injecting critical thought into this discussion, which is mostly insulated from challenging views, could therefore have a very positive effect. To do otherwise would be negligent.

Another reason politicians have probably been reluctant to discuss the grievances Bin Laden and others have raised is because there are many groups who will find themselves agreeing with at least significant portions of what he has said. Many of the grievances Bin Laden listed in his letter could for instance have come from the mouths of fundamentalist Christians. Bin Laden opposes homosexuality, the separation of church and state, recreational drug use, sexual imagery in the media and the trend towards various other 'unwholesome' attitudes. The concord between Bin Laden and evangelical Christians is the sort of thing that could produce some serious discomfort in America's heartland.

But there is probably no one who is immune from agreeing with at least part of what Bin Laden said, and discussing his grievances is likely to draw attention to facts that the US government would rather not have to debate. Bin Laden for instance took the same stance as the majority of the American people when he lamented that the US government failed to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change [source]. He also accused the US of having double standards, citing the weapons of mass destruction possessed by it and its allies, the US support for military coup's to overthrow democratically elected governments, the US granting itself immunity from prosecution under international law, the US violating human rights in Guantanamo Bay, and so on. There is much to agree with here.

Where people strongly disagree with Bin Laden is not so much with the grievances he raised, but in the violent methods he chose to redress them. In particular, his justification for targeting civilians was far from compelling, but he spelled this out in his letter too. His argument was that the United States is a democratic country and hence by electing their government, "the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians." This, he claimed, made them culpable and therefore a legitimate target.

For US citizens to be genuinely responsible for the actions of its government, the choices available to them in elections would have to cover the full spectrum of public opinion on the Palestinian issue. Elsewhere in Bin Laden's letter, he undermines his own position on this by criticising US law as "the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts." Indeed, the reality of US politics is that candidates are preselected on the basis of their ability to raise campaign funds and garner support from the media and the wealthy interests who own it and provide its advertising revenue. This means that voters are only given a choice among candidates who possess a narrow range of views. They have a choice, but not a meaningful one, amounting to a choice between Coke and Pepsi (cola or cola).

The Israel-Palestinian issue is one of those areas of policy where there simply aren't any meaningful differences between the policies of Democratic and Republican administrations. Both have consistently maintained high levels of military and economic aid to Israel despite its military and economic superiority in the region, and have repeatedly vetoed UN resolutions that condemn Israeli military action [view a list]. No matter who Americans vote for, that policy remains the same. This is despite a majority of Americans believing that the US should either completely halt or reduce aid to Israel unless Israeli troops withdraw from the Palestinian territories immediately [source] and a majority believing that the veto power possessed by the United States and the four other founding members of the UN Security Council is unfair and should be scrapped [source].

Even if democracy in the US were functioning in the way that Bin Laden naively assumed it does, he could still only ever claim that democratic elections make a majority of civilians culpable. The remainder, he would have to acknowledge, are completely innocent.

The role of religion is often misunderstood in this conflict. The central motivations are about political grievances rather than things like spreading Islam or ridding the world of infidels. To be sure, Bin Laden thought all Americans should convert to Islam, but US support for Israel is the reason he cited for the September 11 attacks. He began and ended his letter with some quotes from the Quran, passages that permit believers to fight in self-defence, that permit believers to fight only in the cause of God, that reassure believers that God will lead them to victory and that believers should rejoice for those who die in God's name because a bounty of rewards await them in the afterlife. This last belief in particular is an enabling condition for the suicide bomber. Without a belief in the rewards awaiting him, he would be very unlikely to choose this particular method to respond to his political grievances. And by believing that God would guide them to victory, Bin Laden was insanely attempting to take on the largest military power in history. It is completely irrational to engage a foe on a dimension in which they reign supreme. The US is weakest when its opponents force it to justify inconsistencies and double standards in its foreign policy. That happens by forcing politicians to address issues rather than by using violence. Indeed, violence is a strategic mistake for at least one other reason too and that is that the current political climate makes anyone with a genuine desire to redress legitimate grievances of the victims of US foreign policy appear to be appeasing terrorism, which simply makes it more difficult for them to do the right thing.