What Osama bin Laden's Teacher and Spiritual Mentor Told Me

By Eric Margolis

To better understand why Osama bin Laden is so far winning his struggle to oust the western powers from the Muslim world, let us go back to 1986, when I was covering the anti-Soviet war in then almost unknown Afghanistan.

I called on the grandly titled "Afghan Information Center" in Peshawar, Pakistan. Peshawar was a wild and dangerous place. I called it, "Dodge City meets the Arabian Nights" in my book on Afghanistan, War at the Top of the World.

The information center turned out to be a drab little office filled with mimeographed pamphlets and piles of dusty books.

The director was a short, thin man in a torn sweater named Abdullah Azzam. We spoke at length of the anti-Soviet jihad (struggle) in Afghanistan being waged by Afghan and Arab mujahidin.

Then, Azzam told me, "when we have driven the Communist imperialists from Afghanistan, we will go on and drive the American imperialists from Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world."

I was absolutely floored. Except for Communists, a notorious bunch of liars, I had never heard anyone call my beloved America an imperialist power. In those days, the US appeared the acme of good – in large part because its rival, the Soviet Union, looked so wicked.

But after the USSR collapsed, absolute power absolutely corrupted Washington’s ruling circles and drove them to seek "full spectrum domination" of the globe and its energy resources rather than a cooperative new world order.

Sheik Abdullah Azzam was the teacher and spiritual mentor of a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam gave bin Laden the blueprint for his later war against the west.

Azzam was murdered in 1989, likely by a western intelligence service. His pupil, Osama, launched a seemingly quixotic mission to overthrow the western-backed dictatorships and monarchies that misruled the Muslim world, and drive western power from the region.

Bin Laden proclaimed his grand strategy in the 1990’s. He would oust the modern "Crusaders’ by luring the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America’s Achilles’ heel.

Bloody attacks would enrage the US and lure it into one quagmire after another.

Bin Laden was dismissed by western intelligence as a crackpot and "enragé."

But both the dimwitted President Gorge W. Bush and the intelligent President Barack Obama fell right into Osama’s carefully-laid trap.

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Eric Margolis is contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada. He is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.