Osama

Some names will forever be associated with one person, like Elvis, Marlon or
Adolf. Now we have Osama. I saw an interesting biography of him on the BBC
the other day. His father was a Yemeni who settled in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia,
and developed a successful construction business. He had 12 wives, the last
of which was considered the least, and she was nicknamed "the slave." Her
only child, born in 1957 was named Osama, and so he was nicknamed "son of
the slave" by his 52 step-brothers and sisters. That's bound to give someone
a complex.
When he was a teenager he went with a gang of brothers and sisters on a trip
to Norway to "taste" what the West had to offer (Norwegian blondes), but
apparently this did not work out so well. He also studied English in Oxford
like thousands of other "foreigners," but then returned to Riyadh to study
management and economics. There he became more religious and met Sheikh
Abdullah Azam, a charismatic preacher, who had developed a brand of extreme
anti-Western Islam. After he finished his studies he joined the family
business and became extremely wealthy.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 Osama at the age of 22 joined
the jihad against them. There he met Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had broken off
from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1988 and was preaching the concept
of "global jihad" against the West in order to establish a new Caliphate.
Zawahiri had been imprisoned by Pres. Mubarak as one of the ring-leaders
behind the assassination of Pres. Sadat for making peace with Israel. Osama
became his devotee and his financier. Together they established an office
in Riyadh to help volunteers go to fight in Afghanistan, that they called al
Qaeda, or the Base. This became the start of their underground military
organization. With his organizational skills and money Osama used computers
and communications to extend the reach of this informal network.
After the war, and the defeat of the Soviets, Osama returned to Saudi Arabia
and began a campaign against the Government there that he considered was
compromised by its close ties with the US. In 1994, because of these
activities Osama was expelled from Saudi Arabia and was stripped of his
Saudi citizenship. He then settled in Khartoum, Sudan, ruled by a
fundamentalist Islamic Government. By liberally using his money he co-opted
some of the Government leaders to aid him in developing his anti-Western
Islamic organization.
During the Gulf War, the Saudi Government agreed to allow US forces to be
stationed there. This was considered a crime against Islam by Osama and
many other extremists, not that they supported Saddam Hussein, and he wrote
a letter to the Saudi King essentially declaring war on him. This led the
Saudi Government, with US support, to bring pressure on Sudan, to expel
him. Before they did the Sudanese secret service offered to turn him over
to the US, and after he left they offered to give the US secret service all
his remaining files. Both offers were stupidly refused by Pres. Clinton
himself! What shortsightedness. Osama chose to go back to Afghanistan (on
his private jet), where he had been busily setting up military training
camps, and was received with open arms by the Taliban. After settling there
he issued his "fatwa" in 1998 declaring war on the US, that was essentially
ignored until 9/11/01.
The rest as they say is history. Now the last chapter on Osama is under
way. He is almost certainly hiding somewhere in the North West Pakistan
tribal areas, in Waziristan. The Pakistani Army is carrying out a search
and destroy campaign there, and hopefully he will eventually either be
killed or captured. But, his ghastly legacy lives on in the many terrorist
incidents that have been perpetrated and continue in his name.