Osama bin Laden Academically

The very idea of a personality profile of the mastermind of the September 11th, 2001 attacks upon the United States brings to mind the image of the Nazi playwright played by Kenneth Mars explaining his musical tribute to Adolf Hitler in the classic Mel Brooks film The Producers. “The Fuhrer was a great dancer,” Franz Liebkind insists to would-be producers Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, played by, respectively, Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder.

There is more than a little of this line of dialogue echoed in the summary Johns Hopkins professor Peter Bergen makes of his book The Osama bin Laden I Know. “The picture that emerges in the book is of a very shy, reticent, and monosyllabic multimillionaire’s son who didn’t make much of an impression—except this religiosity and the fact that he was rather self-abdicating, giving money away to the poor and sleeping on the floor,” Dr. Bergen told Johns Hopkins magazine associate editor Catherine Pierre. “So, what changed was fighting the Soviets, which he did almost suicidally.”

Dr. Bergen is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins’ Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He met bin Laden before the 9-11 attacks.

“One of the people in the book says that he founded a base specifically so it would take a lot of Soviet fire,” Dr. Bergen told Pierre. “That’s not the way most people set up their bases.”

“He fought bravely, and people started looking up to him.” A terrorism analyst for CNN, Dr. Bergen also wrote Holy War, Inc., a New York Times bestseller. His new book was completed with the aid of half a dozen SAIS students and is based on more than 50 interviews with bin Laden intimates.

“By the account of many people in the book, a group of Egyptian militants told him, ‘Look, why don’t you be our leader? You’ve got leadership potential, ’” Dr. Bergen says. “In Hollywood terms, he’s got a great back story—you know, son of a multimillionaire takes on the Soviets personally.”

At the same time, Dr. Bergen does reject a myth popular in Mid-East studies departments, namely, that the CIA “created” bin Laden. “Yes, that’s a sort of staple of leftists and conspiricists, but there’s no evidence of it,” Dr. Bergen maintains. “There are very few things al Qaeda and the U. S. government agree on—[that the CIA did not fund bin Laden] is one of them.”

“Osama had tons of money. He had personal money, money flooding in from the Saudis—he didn’t need the CIA. And he was quite anti-American beginning in the early ‘80s because of U. S. support of Israel. So it doesn’t make sense.”

Half of the Saudis have a favorable opinion of bin Laden, according to Dr. Bergen, yet less than a tenth of them want to live under a Taliban-style regime. But Dr. Bergen delivers another statistic which is particularly chilling in light of the debate over immigration and student visas.

“My colleague Swati Pandy and I looked at five major anti-Western attacks, and we found that 54 percent of the people involved had been to college,” Dr. Bergen said. “Very few attended madrassah.”

“Many had gone to western colleges, either in Europe or the United States. So the people we need to be concerned about are London School of Economics graduates, not madrassah graduates.”

Or Yalies? The foreign secretary of the Taliban regime that U. S. forces vanquished is now a son of Eli. In light of Dr. Bergen’s closing comments to Pierre, Ivy League officials may be rushing the terrorist timeline.

“Americans have many virtues; patience is not one of them,” Dr. Bergen notes. “We tend to think this year, next election cycle, and that’s it.”

“[bin Laden deputy] Ayman al Zawahiri in his autobiography points out that it took two centuries to get the crusaders out of the Middle East. It took 120 years to get the French out of Algeria. It took 70 years to get the British out of Eqypt. That’s how these guys are thinking—they see it as a generational thing.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.