Social scientists often see the individual as a product of society. But never, never underestimate the impact of personality on society. Or at least, some personalities. The only other personality in recent history who has had as great an impact on global developments as Donald Trump is Osama bin Laden. If Trump is the “Napoleonic” figure of the second 15 years of the twenty-first century—that is, one who shifts the train of history onto a different track—bin Laden was the one who filled that role in the first 15 years. And Trump cannot be understood without Osama.
In the TV series The Looming Tower, the dramatization of events leading up to 9/11, the audience is told that the vision of 72 virgins waiting for them in paradise is what motivated the terrorists.
But that is only half the story. The other half, and probably the greater half, was bin Laden’s strategic vision.
Che Guevara and Osama bin Laden
I don’t know if bin Laden read Ernesto “Che” Guevara. But whether or not he did, he and Che had essentially similar strategic visions. For Che, creating many Vietnams to disperse the forces of the U.S. empire was the vision. For bin Laden, it was a dramatic act that would act as an accelerant to anti-U.S. rebellion throughout the Muslim world. Both were men of action who were determined to put their strategies to an empirical test. Che failed, cornered and murdered in the highlands of Bolivia. Osama succeeded despite a script that did not go according to plan.
The attack on the twin towers was a horrific act of terrorism. But a quarter of a century since then has provided a perspective to condemn it in no uncertain terms as an act of terror while regarding it at the same time as a strategic masterstroke in the war against the U.S. empire.
September 11 did not quite work out the way bin Laden intended. Instead of being inspired, most Muslims were horrified and distanced themselves from the terrible deed. Still, he lucked out, thanks to George W. Bush and the neoconservatives that had come to power with him in Washington in 2001. For them, bin Laden’s attack was a god-given opportunity to teach both America’s enemies and friends that the empire was omnipotent. Ostensibly waged to go after the “roots of terror,” the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were in fact what the Romans called “exemplary wars,” and their aim was to reshape the global strategic environment to fit Washington’s so-called unipolar status following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Here again the personality factor becomes relevant. Disappointed with the reluctance of his father, George H.W. Bush, to finish off Saddam Hussein during the 1990–1991 Gulf War, Bush fils initiated these invasions as the first steps in a demarche that would eliminate the so-called rogue states, compel greater loyalty from dependent states or supplant them with stronger allies, and put strategic competitors, like China, on notice that they should not even think of vying for power with the United States.
Disregarding the lessons of Vietnam and the British and Soviet debacles in Afghanistan, the Bush administration drove the United States into two unwinnable wars against highly motivated insurgents in the Middle East as bin Laden watched with satisfaction, living unperturbed under the nose of an American ally, the Pakistani military, in the peaceful garrison town of Abbottabad. It was not exactly the scenario he had envisaged, but he was not about to quibble if the Bush administration, owing to its drive for unipolar hegemony, placed the United States on the road to overextension, which was, after all, his strategic aim.
America’s Odyssey
What followed was a 25-year U.S. odyssey in the Middle East, with no prospect of reaching Ithaca in sight. Succeeding George Bush as U.S. president, Barack Obama promised to pull America out of the Middle East, but his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq was contradicted by his participation in the toppling of the Gaddafi government in Libya, his overseeing a surge of American forces in Afghanistan, and his expanding the covert war against Taliban targets in Pakistan, which cost hundreds of lives that were justified as necessary “collateral damage.”
Donald Trump rode to power partly on the strength of anti-war sentiment, constantly reminding people during his campaign for the presidency in 2016 that his rival Hillary Clinton had voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when she was a senator. In office, however, he ended up destabilizing the Middle East even more. There was, first of all, his unqualified support for Israel, which led him to a major move that infuriated Arabs: the transfer of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Then, when he took the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, he reversed the one tension-lessening achievement of Obama, which had put effective checks on Tehran’s development of weapons-grade uranium in return for a relaxation of economic sanctions. Finally, he gave a blank check for weapons purchases to Saudi Arabia, enabling the benighted kingdom to wage its cruel intervention in the civil war in Yemen.
When he decided in 2021 to withdraw from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden was not motivated by concerns for global peace but by an urgent desire to reframe U.S. strategy and refocus it on China, where the United States could rely on a strategy of containment, chiefly by naval power, for which its forces were far better geared to carry out than chasing after popular insurgents or engaging in nation-building where the conditions did not exist for success, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Obama had tried to do this with his “Pivot to Asia” but yielded to counter-pressures from his generals to “stay the course” in the Middle East. By the time he came to power, Biden realized that staying the course had radically depreciated U.S. power. That he was no peacenik but a warlord determined to achieve unchallenged U.S. military hegemony with a new strategy would be shown in his provocative moves to bait China in the South China Sea by sailing ships through the Taiwan Strait a few months after the Afghanistan withdrawal.
But as was the case with Obama and Trump, extricating from the Middle East was easier said than done. Instead of military engagement, Washington tried to regain a modicum of control over events there by putting together a diplomatic rapprochement among Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Arabian Gulf states like Qatar that would supposedly stabilize the region. The Hamas offensive into Israel in October 2023, however, blew up this plan for regional stabilization since the Saudi government and the other reactionary Arab states could not afford to come to a deal with Israel while the latter was slaughtering another Arab people, the Palestinians. The United States stood even more isolated than when it withdrew from Afghanistan over two years earlier, condemned by the whole Arab world, indeed by the whole world, as it provided the Israelis with weapons to commit genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, its rival, China, identified with the global South and promoted a peace-making diplomacy that contrasted with Washington’s unqualified support for Israel’s genocidal military offensive.
No End in Sight
Donald Trump again ran as a “peace candidate” in the 2024 elections, but upon his assumption of power, he put himself 100 percent behind Israel’s genocidal strategy in Gaza. His biggest strategic blunder, however, was to allow himself to be lured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into bombing Iran under the illusion that this would trigger a popular uprising. Over six months after his decision to go to war, Trump is trapped and desperate, with the Iranian government in control of events and unwilling to give him an exit ramp except a dishonorable and unconditional retreat. Day by day his unpopularity increases, leading to the great likelihood of the Republicans losing the House of Representatives in the 2026 mid-term elections. But Trump has at least learned one lesson from Bush II’s misadventures: never, never introduce ground troops or you’re really toast.
So, 15 years after he was killed by U.S. Navy Seals in Abbotabad, Osama bin Laden continues to cast his long shadow on the Middle East and US politics. As Nelly Lahoud, the U.S. intelligence analyst who came out with the most detailed study of inner workings of al-Qaeda under bin Laden’s direction, conceded, “Though the 9/11 attacks turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for al-Qaeda, Osama still changed the world and continued to influence global politics for nearly a decade after.” If the United States is the confused and dazed global power that it is today—one that has been, moreover, reduced to a dog being wagged by the Zionist tail—that is, not to an insignificant degree, due to Osama bin Laden.
Sometimes morally condemnable deeds create what are ultimately positive outcomes. Indeed, history which, in less secular times was called divine providence, works in mysterious ways.
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The Long Shadow of Osama bin Laden
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.