Why was Osama bin Laden was a bad leader?

Answer 1

Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia 1957 to a wealthy Yemeni immigrant and his last wife, who was from Syria. She was despised by others in the family as "the slave," according to The New York Times'obituary, and Osama was called "the slave child." Both parents were immigrants in a country "obsessed over lineage." Osama was the only one of the Bin Laden children who never traveled abroad to study, and as the Times says, "That lack of exposure to Western culture would prove a crucial distinction; the other siblings went on to lead lives that would not be unfamiliar to most Americans."

Early on this outcast in a family of great wealth and power turned to Islamic radicalism, and he threw himself into the 1980s Afghanistan war against the Soviet Union, training recruits as an agent of the Saudis. After that he returned to Saudi Arabia and went into the family business, but a turning point came in 1990, when Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait. Bin Laden was horrified that Kuwait turned to the United States, instead of Saudi Arabia, for help. That hardened his ever growing hatred of the U.S.

His rage grew unbounded. In 1996 he issued a "Declaration of War Against the Americans Who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques," and it stated, "Muslims burn with anger at America." In 1998 he declared that Muslims must "kill Americans wherever they are found."

His alternative to a Mideast that cooperated with the United States? A return to a Muslim empire of the seventh century. As his hatred hardened, his view of the world shrank and retreated. After September 11, 2001, his one great, monstrous achievement, he himself shrank and retreated too. His enormous act of terrorism succeeded in the short term, but his delusions prevented him from seeing the obvious fact that he could never bring down the United States or provoke the world to rise up against it. He became a man on the run. His international following shrank and shrank over the succeeding years as he hid and cowered.

When he was killed, he was living in a palatial compound, many times bigger than any other home in its relatively affluent suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan, giving the lie to the myth he promoted that he was an everyman in solidarity with poor Muslims everywhere. The huge house had no telephone or Internet connections. He had cut himself off completely from modern communication with the world. In the end, he was one man with a gun.

Whatever demons first drove him, he had turned to an extreme ideology that expressed the kind of absolute certainty that can feel comforting in the short-term but that destroys all understanding in the long-term. He became fanatically rigid, cut off from any ideas but his own, and from communication with the world. That was why his presence had to wither and almost disappear from global consciousness after September 11, and why when he died there would be almost no one anywhere to lament him.

As a driven, utterly ideological obsessive who isolated himself in every sense and who lived to destroy rather than to build, he was not in any way a true leader. He was an anti-leader.

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