Free The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk

fear that they would appear ignorant if they did not. Bin Laden was different. He was alarming because he was possessed of that quality which leads men to war: total self-conviction. In the years to come, I would see others manifest this dangerous characteristic—President George W. Bush and Tony Blair come to mind—but never the fatal self-resolve of Osama bin Laden.
    There was a dark quality to his calculations. “If one kilogram of TNT exploded in a country in which nobody had heard an explosion in a hundred years,” he said, “surely the exploding of twenty-five hundred kilos of TNT at al-Khobar is clear evidence of the scale of the people’s anger against the Americans and of their ability to continue that resistance against the American occupation.” Had I been a prophet, might I have thought more deeply about that fearful metaphor which bin Laden used, the one about the TNT? Was there not a country—a nation which knew no war within its borders for well over a hundred years—which could be struck with “evidence” of a people’s anger, 2,500 times beyond anything it might imagine? But I was calculating more prosaic equations.
    Bin Laden had asked me—a routine of every Palestinian under occupation—if Europeans did not resist occupation during the Second World War. I told him no Europeans would accept this argument over Saudi Arabia—because the Nazis killed millions of Europeans yet the Americans had never murdered a single Saudi. Such a parallel was historically and morally wrong. Bin Laden did not agree. “We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together . . . We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon . . . When sixty Jews are killed inside Palestine”—he was talking about Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel—“all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children did not receive the same reaction.” It was bin Laden’s first reference to Iraq and to the UN sanctions which were to result, according to UN officials themselves, in the death of more than half a million children. “Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam,” bin Laden said. “We as Muslims do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future.” It was the first time I heard him use the word “crusade.”
    But it was neither the first—nor the last—time that bin Laden would distance himself from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Much good would it do him. Seven years later, the United States would launch an invasion of Iraq that would be partly justified by the regime’s “support” of a man who so detested it. But these were not the only words which bin Laden uttered that night to which I should have paid greater attention. For at one point, he placed his right hand on his chest. “I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against all Muslims everywhere,” he said. “Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans.”
    For some time, there had been a steadily growing thunderstorm to the east of bin Laden’s camp and we could see the bright orange flash of lightning over the mountains on the Pakistan border. But bin Laden thought this might be artillery fire, the continuation of the inter-mujahedin battles that had damaged his spirit after the anti-Soviet war. He was growing uneasy. He broke off his conversation to pray. Then on the straw mat, several young and armed men served dinner— plates of yoghurt and cheese and Afghan nan bread and more tea. Bin Laden sat between his sons, silent, eyes on his food.