When his plans were ready in early 1998, he procured a fatwa from a tame cleric to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – and to ‘liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [Jerusalem] and the holy mosque of Mecca’. That August, bin Laden killed hundreds when his suicidists drove truck bombs into US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Clinton ordered missile attacks on bin Laden in Sudan, which was forced to expel the terrorist.
Bin Laden had lost his family income and was living on subscriptions from Saudi backers when he got Omar’s invitation. He arrived on a private plane with wives and 300 mujahedin. Backed by Omar, now calling himself Amir al-Mu'minin, and Haqqani, justice minister, bin Laden declared war on the USA and started to train al-Qaeda volunteers. As Clinton secretly ordered his capture or assassination, Omar helped bin Laden set up headquarters, where he now considered a long-time ambition: an attack on American skyscrapers. In 1999, a trusted Pakistani henchman proposed a spectacular attack by suicidists piloting jet planes* into the Twin Towers, the prestigious Manhattan skyscrapers with which he was familiar because they had been abortively attacked by his nephew seven years earlier.
Suicide bombers had been invented by the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers,* quickly copied by jihadis. Bin Laden grasped the power of attacking the homeland: ‘to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting’. Although a US commando attack on al-Qaeda camps was cancelled, Clinton ordered missile strikes – just missing bin Laden, who was already personally selecting his team of suicidists, in particular a cell from Hamburg who spoke English, nineteen of whom were now dispatched to learn aviation in American flight schools. ‘I was responsible for entrusting the nineteen brothers with the raids,’ bin Laden later bragged. Fifteen of the nineteen were Saudi. Its date was chosen for the defeat of the Ottomans outside Vienna in 1683.
Although the CIA and FBI realized that bin Laden was planning an American attack, and although the two agencies collected shards of intelligence, including the bizarre revelation that there were Arab pilots who were only interested in studying take-off but not landing, they were, with a few stellar exceptions, too competitive to share information and too unimaginative to grasp the scale of bin Laden’s ambition.
Three months after Putin’s warning, on 11 September 2001 George W. Bush was listening to children reading The Pet Goat in a Floridian school when his chief of staff interrupted to whisper in his ear: ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’
As Bush arrived at the school, nineteen mass murderers had seized four jet planes, filled with innocent civilians; at 8.46 a.m., the first plane, controlled by five terrorists, flew into the 110-storey North Tower of the World Trade Center; Bush was informed that a small plane had accidentally crashed into the tower; he then entered the schoolroom. At 9.03 a.m., the second plane flew into the South Tower. As terrified people jumped from the higher storeys, with the world watching on live TV, the towers collapsed – a vision of live pandemonic apocalypse. At 9.37 a.m. a third plane dived into the Pentagon in DC. Each plane was the scene of desperate yet unknown despair and heroism; in a fourth plane, assigned to the White House or the Capitol, brave passengers, after wishing loved ones goodbye in heartbreaking messages, cried ‘Let’s roll!’ and attacked the terrorists, who in the ensuing struggle crashed the plane into a Pennsylvanian field at 10.03. Altogether 2,977 were killed, as well as all the terrorists. Bin Laden had laid the bait, and already American potentates were considering whether to hit not just bin Laden and the Taliban but also Saddam Hussein. That afternoon, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wondered if intelligence was ‘good enough to hit SH at same time. Not only OBL … Need to move swiftly … Go massive … Sweep it all up. Things related or not.’
Amid panic and fear in the heartland, the fifty-five-year-old Bush, converted to his new mission, turned to his experienced vice-president Dick Cheney, a midwestern Yalie with a snarl who, as Bush senior’s defence secretary, had supervised Desert Storm before making money chairing the oil service company Halliburton. ‘I can hear you,’ Bush told Americans through a bullhorn at a Ground Zero stinking of fire and death. ‘So will the people who knocked down these buildings.’ Soon afterwards he warned the Taliban to ‘hand over the terrorists, or … share in their fate’. Cheney, the most powerful vice-president in US history, devised new domestic powers making it easier to find terrorists and unleashed the CIA to hunt them across the world and foil more atrocities. As he sanctioned the ‘rendition’ (seizure), ‘enhanced interrogation’ (torture) and imprisonment of suspects in secret ‘black prisons’ lent by sympathetic powers, Bush declared a worldwide War on Terror that encompassed a global anti-terror campaign and two land wars.
In October, American troops, aided by sympathetic northern warlords, many of them Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, invaded Afghanistan. Special units, Operational Detachment Alpha 574, rode south on horseback, taking part in history’s last cavalry charges. The quick conquest and the establishment of a new president, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun whose father had been shot by the Taliban, encouraged an exhilarating confidence in American paramountcy that called for a wider mission. Amir Omar escaped to Pakistan, as did bin Laden, both aided by the Haqqani terror dynasty led by the founder’s son Sirajuddin.
Although there was no real connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, in January 2002 Bush warned Americans of an Axis of Evil – the phrase a reference to the Hitler Axis of the Second World War – including North Korea, Iraq and Iran, which could not be permitted ‘to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons’. Cheney and Rumsfeld proposed an ambitious escalation: not only to destroy an unfinished enemy, Saddam Hussein, but to impose American democracy in west Asia.
Saddam had slaughtered rebel Kurds and Arabs to restore his power after Desert Storm, but in August 1995, his two sons-in-law – cousins, the brothers Hussein and Saddam Kamel, married to his daughters Raghad and Rana – suddenly fled Baghdad and drove in a convoy across the desert to Jordan, where they were given asylum. The loss of his daughters was humiliating, but the Kamels had clashed with the demented Uday, who dubbed himself Abu Sarhan – Son of the Wolf – and was once again terrorizing Baghdad: girls were raped, men beaten; a group of French tourists were forced to have sex with each other at gunpoint. All remembered not his mania but his ‘eerie quietness’. He had recently rushed into a family party, fought with his brothers-in-law and, drawing his gun, accidently shot an uncle in the leg.
Hussein Kamel, who had helped procure Saddam’s illegal weapons, had destroyed them after 1991 and now, debriefed by the CIA, he confirmed their destruction. But Saddam approached the brothers through his daughters, promising protection if they returned. Foolishly, in February 1996, they all went back to Baghdad, where, after being ordered to divorce their wives, they were attacked in their house by their clan and killed after a twelve-hour shootout. The sisters blamed their brother Uday for the killing. Soon afterwards, Uday’s car was ambushed and he was wounded but survived. Blaming his sisters, he arrested them, claiming they had planned to kill him. Eventually Saddam restored some family order among his murderous spawn.
Saddam did not believe the Americans would attack him again. Like the Kims in North Korea, he felt vulnerable without weapons of mass destruction. A lifelong radical, he hated the supervision of the west, which he feared could embolden Iran. His policy was to destroy his weapons so as not to give America a pretext, while refusing to cooperate in order to maintain the menace towards Iran. It was the most catastrophic bluff in history.