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But Bin
Laden does illustrate how much many Muslims in
the Middle East hate America because of half a
century of American foreign policies which have
supported Israel and manipulated Middle Eastern
politics.
Bin Laden
is fighting a Muslim holy war to force US troops
to withdraw from Saudi Arabia, where they have
been based since the Gulf War in 1991 against
Iraq.
He was
probably involved in car bombs that blew up the
US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August
1998 and a series of other attacks US
targets.
An
informed Saudi source told Out There News after
the embassy attacks that Bin Laden had
been campaigning against
the US presence for eight years,
from the
moment Iraq invaded Kuwait and Saudi Arabia
dropped its long-standing refusal to allow
American troops to be based permanently on its
territory.
A long
document which sympathisers believe was written
by Bin Laden in 1996 explains his arguments in
detail: the American forces in Saudi Arabia
(upwards of 5,000, mainly supporting air
operations over southern Iraq) are an army of
occupation invited in by an incompetent and
illegitimate Saudi government. The US military
presence is damaging the Saudi economy, because
the Saudi government has paid huge sums to the
United States for military protection and has
been forced to run its oil policy in the
interests of America rather than of Saudi
Arabia. The Americans are infidels and have no
place protecting the country which contains
Islam's holiest places, Mecca and
Medina.
But the source said Bin Laden had only
relatively recently turned to
violence to
achieve his goal. His first move, in 1990 or
1991, was to write to Saudi Arabia's King Fahd
offering to train Saudis to resist Iraq as he
had successfully trained thousands of Arabs who
volunteered to fight against Soviet forces in
Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The idea was
rejected. Bin Laden, banned from travelling
outside Saudi Arabia because of an earlier
letter to the King demanding political reforms,
slipped out of the country to Sudan where he
used his family's wealthy construction business
to build roads for the radical Islamic
government.
The source said the turning
point in Bin Laden's attitude towards the Saudi
and US governments came in 1994, when the Saudi
authorities clamped down on Muslim religious
scholars who had been agitating for political
reforms. Two men he revered were
arrested.
At the
same time, the Saudi and US governments put
pressure on Sudan to expel Bin Laden, and he
moved to Afghanistan, where he was more isolated
from the outside world but also freer to
act.
In Afghanistan, Bin Laden teamed up
with other Muslim militants who, like him, could
find nowhere else to base themselves - most
notably Ayman al-Zawahary from the Egyptian
group Islamic Jihad.
Bin Laden may or may
not have been involved in bomb attacks on US
military installations in Riyad and al-Khobar in
Saudi Arabia in 1995. But he publicly called for
a holy war against the US presence in Saudi
Arabia in late 1996 and he has come close to
claiming responsibility openly for the US
embassy bombings in Kenya and
Tanzania.
The Arab newspaper al-Hayat
received a phone call and three communiques from
a previously unknown group called the Islamic
Army to Liberate the Holy Places saying that it
carried out the bombings. It later received a
statement from the Islamic Front for fighting
Jews and Crusaders, an organisation established
by Bin Laden and Zawahary in February, warning
that there would be further attacks on US
targets, which arrived together with three more
communiques from the Islamic Army.
An
uncomfortable point for the United States is
that there is a widespread feeling among
educated people in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
that the American military presence is wrong and
it would cost them less in lost sovereignty to
reach an accommodation with Iraq. They do not
support Bin Laden's violence, but they
understand his
goal. | 
