The "Ladenese Epistle"

WHAT IS THE ROLE and responsibility of Saudi Arabia in financing Osama bin Laden, poster boy for Wahhabism, the extremist Islamic sect that justifies murder?

In some quarters, efforts are emerging to quash discussion of Wahhabism and of the Saudi connection to September 11. The Saudis are unhappy, and U.S. government officials serving in the kingdom are even more unhappy, that the topic has gained attention in the Western media. The Saudis ask for "healing," not investigation; the diplomats call for "trust," rather than inquiry.

A side effect of the expanding Saudi cover-up is the emergence of a classic bit of disinformation: the common wisdom holding that Osama bin Laden has called for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, and therefore is "as much a threat to them as to us."

Well, actually, he hasn't, and he isn't. Anyone needing to be disabused of two fantasies--that bin Laden is a serious enemy of the Saudi regime and that Iraq and Saddam Hussein aren't intimate with the Islamofascist terror command--should read bin Laden's own political and pseudo-religious declarations. I call them pseudo-religious because they have no serious Islamic content and bin Laden himself has no significant religious training.

Three main documents of bin Ladenism are available on the Internet. The first of these, the "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," also known as the "Ladenese Epistle," dates from October 1996 and can be read at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4342-2001Sep21.html.

The "Ladenese Epistle" is the longest of Osama's available statements. It is also the most stuffed with Islamic verbiage, most of it perfunctory and hortatory, as if hastily composed. To read this text, one might think that indeed bin Laden was mainly concerned with rescuing Muslims through holy war. But after a laundry list of geographical citations ranging from Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Philippines intended to portray an Islamic global community everywhere under assault, the author turns to his main obsession: the justification by some Saudi Islamic scholars of the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. He does not at first mention the country, and he seldom takes up any Saudi leader by name. The style is courteous to the Saudi rulers, because bin Laden does not wish to betray his connection with Riyadh, any more than his Saudi friends wish it to be revealed.

Bin Laden's complaints about Saudi Arabia are those of a critic, not a revolutionary enemy. The oil wealth has been concentrated in a single family, the Sauds; he bemoans the resulting inequality but skirts discussion of those responsible. Various other grievances, ranging from the unemployment of overeducated youths to a kind of general malaise, are cited with vague indignation.

Here and elsewhere in bin Laden's writings, one has the sense of someone going out of his way not to say certain things. Those things involve the personalities of the Saudi rulers. Since bin Laden continued to draw on financial resources in the kingdom while living in Afghanistan, and was in no physical danger from Saudi hands, he can only be observing a policy of discretion, not expressing fear.

Bin Laden is not a thinker or strategist; he is an opportunistic improviser in the style of Hitler or Stalin. Calling for action by the Saudi populace to expel U.S. troops, he advises murdering Americans. But when he summons Saudi citizens to correct the policies of their government, he never calls for killing or other forms of terror. Rather, he praises the drafting of petitions to the king and recommends that Saudi women boycott American consumer goods. He is aggrieved by the failure of the Saudi army to defend itself ably in the Gulf War, but also by the destruction inflicted on Iraq, which he exaggerates.

So much for the claim of former president Bill Clinton and others that bin Laden is anti-Saddam, or the Iraqis' own disclaimers that they are not Wahhabis (which is true but irrelevant). If an intolerant Wahhabi like bin Laden can embrace the propaganda of leftist Iraq, there is no reason they should not return the favor by cooperating with his terror schemes.