Fed by Intrigue, the Myth of Bin Laden Grows

Dark facial hair isn’t mandatory, but it adds to the aura of intrigue. The eyes may be hard-set and smoldering, like the Ayatollah Khomeini’s, or soulful and sensitive, like Che Guevara’s. Typically, only a few murky biographical details are known, leaving rumor and legend to fill in the gaps.

But the most crucial trait for any bogeyman of U.S. foreign policy is elusiveness, a protean quality that’s both physical and almost metaphysical. It’s what can turn a rogue dictator, rebel commander or head of a sub rosa terrorist network into a mass-media emblem, an international symbol who provokes revulsion in some, adulation in others.

So it is with Osama bin Laden, a man who is lionized in some parts of the Islamic world but condemned by most Americans for the murder of more than 6,000 of their fellow citizens in the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Though no proof has yet been made public of his involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, Bin Laden has quickly become the glowering personification of global terrorism, summoning intense feelings of anger, hatred and anxiety, as well as a gathering fascination.

“We’re turning him into a kind of icon of evil,” says Richard E. Rubenstein, a professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Virginia, and author of “Alchemists of Revolution--Terrorism in the Modern World.”

The preoccupation with Bin Laden may result in part from the void of new reliable information about him. Only a handful of Western journalists ever has interviewed him, and with the world bracing for warfare, his movements and motivations can only be guessed at by most people.

The 44-year-old exile’s rise to international celebrity is both revealing and disturbing, some foreign policy analysts and cultural observers say. By focusing so intently on Bin Laden, America may be oversimplifying complex geopolitical issues and forsaking a process of slow, deliberative fact-gathering for a form of ritualized myth-making. The Bin Laden phenomenon, some argue, reduces the aspirations and grievances of millions of Muslims around the world to a psychological mug shot of just one man.

“The consequence of paying too much attention to this guy is that you’re not focusing on the real threat and you’re missing potential other threats,” says British journalist Simon Reeve, author of “The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism” (1999). “Bin Laden is one part of a bigger picture. He’s one element of a group that is threatening the West now. The problem will not go away if Bin Laden is attacked, arrested or imprisoned. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Given Bin Laden’s documented track record as a sponsor of anti-Western activities, and his bitter contempt for the United States and the culture it represents, the current attention certainly comes as no surprise. No one interviewed for this story suggested that Bin Laden shouldn’t be regarded as a prime suspect in last month’s attacks, though some expressed the fervent wish that the U.S. or its allies would produce a smoking gun, if they have one.

“If we have proof, for God’s sake, put it on the table so the whole world would know, and bring this animal to justice,” says Ghazi Khan Kan, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, New York chapter.

Several people also said that examining Bin Laden’s personal history and his worldview can shed light on the motivations of the militant Al Qaeda network and other Muslims who support his call for “jihad,” or holy war, against the West.

Yet the factors propelling Bin Laden’s infamy appear to be more complicated. Americans, some contend, have a habit of looking at politics, both at home and abroad, in terms of personalities rather than policies. Saturated with pop psychology, we search for the Freudian underpinnings of complex world events, the Rosebud that will unlock a nexus of cluttered meanings.

Thus, while some commentators have attributed Bin Laden’s anti-Western outlook to specific historical events, such as the 1978 Camp David peace accords or the 1991 outbreak of the Gulf War, others trace it to his formative years. “A key to [Bin Laden’s] holy war against America may be found in his childhood,” one British newspaper declared recently, referring to his father’s death in a plane crash when Bin Laden was 10.

Slate, the online magazine, framed a Sept. 13 story about the attacks with a spin on Freud’s famous query about women: “What Does Osama Bin Laden Want?” Author David Plotz’s chilling conclusion was that Bin Laden wants absolutely nothing the West can offer. This characterization of Bin Laden as possessed by a kind of inscrutable, all-consuming malice recalls the aliens’ nihilistic one-word response in the movie “Independence Day” when the U.S. president asks what they want earthlings to do: “Die.”

In fact, says terrorism expert Rubenstein, Bin Laden has made clear in previous remarks that he is seeking to force a U.S. withdrawal from the Arabian peninsula. He also hopes to destabilize pro-Western regimes in the Middle East and possibly provoke a U.S. military response that will further anger and alienate the Muslim world. “It’s actually quite clear what he wants,” Rubenstein says. “What makes him different is not what he wants, but the way he proposes to get it.”

The tabloids also have picked up the pop-psychological narrative thread. Last week, in one of the more improbable hypotheses, the Globe reported that Bin Laden “suffers from a medical condition that left him with underdeveloped sex organs, and his hatred of the United States began when an American girl laughed at his problem.”

While childhood trauma or--who knows?--sexual dysfunction may be part of the equation, Reeve, a former reporter for the Sunday Times of London, says he doesn’t think that “Americans really understand the true nature of the threat, and I think [people] are looking for relatively simplistic analyses.”

Michael Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., echoes his point. “It’s easier for Americans to personalize a very difficult phenomenon,” Klare says, than decipher its root causes.

Whichever psychological profile of Bin Laden one chooses, Reeve suggests, it needs to take stock of his political evolution and the global context that has shaped him. “Perhaps it’s easier for us to imagine [Bin Laden] as the devil incarnate, who’s always had these extreme views. But if we are to have a chance of preventing these kind of attacks in the future, we [need to] understand the mentality of the kind of person who would commit these attacks.”

As a great world power, America seems to require larger-than-life adversaries. This may be why a brutal but drab bureaucrat like Slobodan Milosevic and a seriocomic opera character like Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega never fully engaged the national imagination. This country gravitates toward more dramatic, enigmatic figures: deranged would-be prophets like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, or an inscrutable “mastermind of terror” (as U.S. News & World Report described Bin Laden) who strikes without warning then melts back into the jungle mists or steals away to a remote mountain lair, like a James Bond villain.

Bin Laden isn’t the first foreign adversary to inspire this type of obsessive reaction. Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Cuban President Fidel Castro, Iran’s Khomeini and, more recently, Col. Moammar Kadafi of Libya and Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein all have aroused similar sentiments of fear and loathing. But the dark, often conflicting imagery and loaded descriptive terms surrounding Bin Laden suggest that he has struck several of these archetypal chords simultaneously.

“The closest thing I can think of is, Ho Chi Minh fascinated Americans in the same way,” says Klare, referring to the late Vietnamese communist leader. “Here is an individual [Bin Laden], not a government, who has had the audacity to do what governments do, to organize armies and fight major powers. I don’t want to give the impression I admire the man--I despise him. But one has to recognize the audaciousness and daring. I think it’s a completely unprecedented story.”

It’s also a story that’s being heavily promoted to the American public. In the weeks since the attacks, Bin Laden’s hold on the national imagination appears to have grown, not diminished. From coast to coast, he is dissected on op-ed pages and demonized on talk radio.

Last week, Bin Laden’s doe-eyed visage stared out from the covers of all three major news magazines. Time chose a softly lit head shot. Newsweek opted for a pixilated close-up that transformed his face into a mask of blood. U.S. News & World Report showed his features superimposed over a map of Central Asia, a rifle’s cross-hairs framing one eye.

These contrasting but complementary images indicate the potency and flexibility of Bin Laden’s expanding myth. Much as the attacks assimilated several of our deepest cultural phobias--our worst-case scenarios of terrorist subterfuge and technology run amok--representations of Bin Laden fuse several legendary bad-guy personas into one frightening composite. In the eyes of much of the Western mass media, he has become a one-man rogue’s gallery, a perversion of Joseph Campbell’s mythological prototype, the Hero With a Thousand Faces. Bin Laden is the Anti-Hero With a Thousand Faces.

“It plays into a kind of tendency we have in American thinking to see everything as taking place in sort of an eternal present, and to make people into characters in a morality play, instead of real historical beings, whose ideas and personalities and everything else develop in the course of time and in an environment,” says Rubenstein. “It’s the worst kind of abstraction because it abstracts people from time and place and their environment. So it’s a way of masking them. They speak like characters in a Greek play.”

It’s a play in which Bin Laden has been scripted and typecast for several different roles. President Bush’s speechwriters have implicitly linked him to Hitler and Stalin, to “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century.” A Sept. 24 story in the Independent, a left-leaning London daily, said Bin Laden “will join the ranks of history’s most infamous men,” likening him to Chinese communist patriarch Mao Tse-tung and the medieval Mongol warlord Genghis Khan. “The cocktail of genes, nurture, expertise, alienation and opportunity that creates a charismatic but malevolent leader like that occurs once a century, if that,” the story read.

Yet just a week earlier, the Independent had run another story, quite different in tone, declaring that, “to many people in the Islamic world,” Bin Laden was “a romantic, T.E. Lawrence-type figure, a freedom fighter against the oppressive Soviet invader.” The reference was to the fabled Lawrence of Arabia, an Englishman who fought with the Arabs against the oppressive Turkish empire during World War I.

Like Saddam Hussein, another former U.S. ally-turned-enemy, Bin Laden has been compared to Frankenstein’s monster, attacking his own creators. A widely circulated e-mail casts him as the evil “Binch” in a parody of Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” (“It could be his turban was screwed on too tight./Or the sun from the desert had beaten too bright.”)

Some commentators refer to Bin Laden’s “megalomania” (Washington Post). Others describe him as “modest, almost shy” (BBC News), a fragile figure with kidney problems who walks with a cane. A few have compared his charismatic appeal to that of a cult leader, evoking a mesmerizing, modern-day Rasputin ushering brainwashed minions through a high-tech Heaven’s Gate.

“The domestic equivalent, I think, would be someone like Charlie Manson: the violence, the drugs, the cult, the fear,” says Juliette N. Kayyem, executive director of the program on domestic preparedness at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former member of the National Commission on Terrorism.

Bin Laden’s followers idolize him as the prodigal scion of a Saudi construction magnate, a trust-fund baby so devoted to his cause that he renounced his family’s wealth and reportedly now lives like an outlaw, surrounded by his warrior brethren, four wives, multiple children and trusty Kalashnikov rifle. Western pundits are more inclined to see this as a mark of patrician kookiness: Howard Hughes as Holy Warrior.

Occasionally, the characterizations flat-out contradict each other. Some reports say Bin Laden spent his youth in ascetic devotions, his nose buried in the Koran. Others claim he idled it away, drinking and “womanizing” his way through Beirut with other Saudi jet-setters. One British article has described him as “a tall figure with an aristocrat demeanor,” while Newsweek writers Rod Nordland and Jeffrey Bartholet find him “soft-spoken, languid in his movements, almost effeminate.” Even Bin Laden’s height is variously listed as 6 feet 3, 6 feet 4 or 6 feet 6.

A few commentators have imputed godlike powers of omniscience to him, marveling at the attack’s precision and the planning it must have entailed. Descriptions of Bin Laden’s “elusive” character, the reported 40 attempts made on his life, and his “shadowy” supporters, who are “everywhere and nowhere,” have become journalistic commonplaces.

Kayyem thinks that Bin Laden’s mythic stature derives in part from his careful stage-management of the Western media. By limiting access, he enhances his personal mystery. “He’s never been on a talk show. No one knows what he sounds like. No one’s ever really seen him talk, except a few of those journalists. U.S. intelligence lost track of him probably over a year ago, so you’re not getting any new information,” Kayyem says. “That element of the unknown is kind of fascinating, in an awful way.”

Reeve, the British journalist, says he didn’t command the resources to interview Bin Laden face to face for his book. Instead, he drew on unpublished reports and interviews with intelligence agents and others. Now he says he can see other Western reporters recycling second-and third-hand accounts of Bin Laden.

“I can find information and comments that’ve clearly been lifted straight from my book,” he says. “There’s clearly a reliance on just a few sources of information.”

In a way, as Bush told the nation in his speech before Congress two weeks ago, America has seen the likes of Bin Laden before. But the president’s allusions to the last century’s towering ogres might have been slightly off the mark.

A closer parallel may be Pancho Villa, a onetime U.S. ally who, after a falling-out, led an attack on Columbus, N.M., in March 1916--the first foreign invasion of the United States since the War of 1812. After Villa and his army torched the village and killed 18 U.S. citizens, an outraged President Wilson dispatched 7,000 troops to chase him into the mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico. Airplanes, the newfangled technology of the day, were used to scour the deserts. A British vice consul in Mexico described Villa as “a dog in rabies, a mad mullah, a Malay running amok.”

Eighty-five years later, the rhetoric is familiar and the final outcome may well be too. Villa was assassinated, possibly with U.S. help, in 1923.