The Enemy (3 page)

Surveying the other dictatorships of the area, whether pro-American or otherwise, can one argue that al-Qaeda did anything to challenge their rule or hasten their recent demise? The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, now fully exposed as a murderous one-man and one-party state, helped facilitate the transit of jihadists into Iraq, where the forces of al-Qaeda made a military alliance with the former security services of the Saddam Hussein regime, and blew up the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra with the undisguised aim of unleashing a confessional war between Sunni and Shi’a. The Saudi system did attract bin Laden’s hostility, but only because he considered its repressive brand of Wahhabi Islam to be insufficiently dogmatic and fundamentalist. It was chiefly in the more open and tolerant countries, such as Turkey and Tunisia and Morocco, that al-Qaeda used its methods of indiscriminate bombing and killing, against such targets as historic synagogues and tourist cafes.

Dotted throughout bin Laden’s later sermons, in a rather too obvious attempt to ingratiate himself with a certain strand of radical opinion, there are some puerile or sophomoric allusions to the Kyoto treaty on global warming, along with recommendations of the essays of Noam Chomsky and the films of Michael Moore. But these gestures are eclipsed by the foam-flecked passages in which he accuses the United States of inventing the AIDS virus, or of being the prey of homosexuals and the gambling industry. And hovering over all of this, so crudely and so obviously that some people apparently ceased to notice it, is always the central theme: the self-granting of general permission to take certain kinds of life. President Bush was wrong to say that this was an attack on “America”: long before 9/11 the full weight of such arrogations was being felt by the Hazara population of Afghanistan, and by Indians, whether secular or Hindu.

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was “a war without end.” I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality
is
an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one. Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones. As Bertold Brecht’s character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat. But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for. As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden’s carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.