The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden

The PLO in Beirut

   The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization - now known as the PA (Palestinian Authority)) was actually founded in 1964 and became part of the UN in 1974, even though the US and Israel considered them to be a terrorist group until the Madrid Conference in 1991.  The PLO had moved it's primary base of operations to Beirut, Lebanon in the early 1970's.  Their main Lebanese counterpart at this time was the Kataeb Party - better known in the U.S. as Phalanges or Phalangists.  The Phalanges are Maronite Christians while the PLO was an Islamic organization.  This in turn, led to the Christian/Muslim conflict of 1975-76 in which Syria allied with the PLO in Lebanon.  Over the next few years, the PLO and Syria gained more power in Lebanon than Lebanon's own government.  Israel and the now PLO/Syria controlled Lebanon were now at war, with an assassination attempt of Israel's ambassador and the successful assassination of Bashir Gemayel, the newly elected president of Lebanon.  In 1978, 1981 and again in early 1982, the UN sponsored cease fires in the hope of peaceful negotiations.  They did not work. 

   In the summer of 1982, Israel began Operation Peace for Galilee.  This was the monicker for another invasion in Lebanon and a full-scale attack on Beirut with much US supplied weaponry.  Israel hoped to complete the siege as quickly as possible; their goal all along in invading Lebanon was for a quick and decisive victory. In addition, the United States, through their representative Philip Habib, was pushing for peace negotiations; the longer the siege took, the greater Arafat's bargaining power would be.  For seven weeks, Israel attacked the city by sea, air, and land, cutting off food & water supplies, disconnecting the electricity, and securing the airport and some southern suburbs.  Thousands of civilians, suffered alongside the PLO guerrillas.  Israel was roundly accused of indiscriminately shelling the city in addition to the other measures taken to weaken the PLO.  By the end of the first week of July, 500 buildings had been destroyed by Israeli shells and bombs.  On 10 of August, when American envoy Philip Habib submitted a draft agreement to Israel, defense minister Ariel Sharon, probably impatient with what he regarded American meddling, ordered a saturation bombing of Beirut, during which at least 300 people died.  Estimates from the time show that approximately 20,000 civilians were killed during this war.  Although PLO leaders had been targeted with bombing runs, buildings were destroyed but the leaders had fled.

  Al-Qaeda was just a twinkle in Osama Bin Laden's eye at this time.  In fact, you could say that this was the twinkle.  Here is a little back story before we go on.  The US Sixth Fleet had an aircraft carrier stationed off the coast of Lebanon that the Israeli Air Force was using for helicopter and aircraft refueling and re-armament.  The "towers in Lebanon" refers ancient towers that had stood since the days of the "Songs of Solomon" in the Bible and are also mentioned in the Quran.  "God (Allah) knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers, but after the situation became unbearable—and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon—I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women."  ~ Osama Bin Laden 2004

    Also of note, the siege of Beirut was condemned by the US, and we publicly warned Israel that any weaponry that we provided was meant to be provided for defensive purposes only.  Odd that we would say that, since our sixth fleet was there the whole time.  Also odd that afterward, when the Soviet Union tried to pass a United Nations resolution calling for a worldwide arms embargo on Israel, it was vetoed by the US.  Of course it may have been that Ronald Reagan saw this as a changing world and felt that we may be on the verge of fighting terror with a bit of "terror" of our own. 

   In October of 1983, members of a Multinational Force (MNF) in Lebanon, were in place as international peacekeepers to oversee the withdrawal of the PLO.  The MNF included United States Marines and Navy SEALs, French paratroopers, and Italian and British soldiers.  All seemed to be going as planned until the 23rd of October.  On this fateful day, two trucks loaded with over ten tons of TNT drove into the barracks compound and were detonated.  The first was the Marine barracks which killed 241 American servicemen.  Another 128 were wounded in the blast.  This incident was the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since World War II's Battle of Iwo Jima, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States military since the first day of the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive, and the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II.  Minutes later, in the attack on the French barracks, 58 paratroopers were killed and 15 injured.  The wife and four children of a Lebanese janitor at the French building were also killed, and more than twenty other Lebanese civilians were also injured.  It was France's single worst military loss since the end of the Algerian War.


 

The Battle of Jaji


    In 1979, Russia's Leonid Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan.  By 1986, the conflict had taken a disastrous toll on Russia due to the fact that Jimmy Carter and then, in a much larger part, Ronald Reagan were feeding billions of dollars in arms to the Islamic resistance.  Tens of thousands of Soviet troops had died, military morale was crumbling and popular protest, unheard of until then in Communist Russia, was on the rise. Mikhail Gorbachev, now the Russian general-secretary of the Communist Party saw the writing on the wall and said in a Politburo meeting in November of that year, "People ask: 'What are we doing there?' Will we be there endlessly? Or should we end this war? ... The strategic objective is to finish the war in one, maximum two years, and withdraw the troops. We have set a clear goal: Help speed up the process, so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there."
   It should be noted that the United States involvement in Afghanistan at this time was not a battle over Afghanistan itself.  It was seen as a struggle between Eastern tyranny and Western freedom.  In February of 1987, when Gorbachev proposed his exit strategy for pulling his troops out of Afghanistan, this exit strategy would also call for negotiations with the United States to stop their arms shipments.  Within days after the public announcement of this, Gorbachev learned that Reagan had no interest in such a deal and was quoted in saying, "the United States has set itself the goal of obstructing a settlement by any means," in order "to present the Soviet Union in a bad light."  Without cooperation from the United States, Gorbachev was unable to withdraw.  The people of Afghanistan that his troops were now protecting would have been driven out of their homes and massacred.  So in April of 1987, Soviet troops, supported by helicopters and bombers, attacked an Islamic compound of fighters in the mountain passes of Jaji near the Pakistani border.  The leader of those fighters, mostly Arab volunteers, was Osama Bin Laden.
   Bin Laden's Arab volunteer's numbered about 50 and suffered just over a dozen casualties against the 200 Russian troops that were on the ground and air power during the battle that lasted almost one week.  During the battle, Bin Laden himself reportedly suffered a foot wound and this was all chronicled daily by Arab journalists.  The Battle of Jaji marked the birth of Osama Bin Laden's public reputation as a warrior and military leader.  After Jaji, he began a media campaign designed to publicize the brave fight waged by a handful of Arab volunteers against a superpower.
   Had Reagan been willing to strike a deal and stop the arms shipments, the Battle of Jaji would never have taken place.  Of course at this time in history, no one would have any idea who or what Osama Bin Laden would turn out to be and Al Qaeda didn't even exist yet, possibly not even to a full extent in the mind of Bin Laden himself.  But Islamic militancy was already on the rise.  Before the Beirut conflict, there was the Ayatollah Khomeini situation in Iran during which the U.S. Embassy employees were held hostage.  In fact, that was one of the reasons that Ronald Reagan won his presidential election so decisively, because American hostages were taken by Islamic militants on Jimmy Carter's watch.

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http://www.antiwar.com/pena/?articleid=9755
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_sharon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kataeb_Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/06/breaking-%E2%9E%99-new-video-thousands-of-iraqi-soldiers-captured-by-isis/
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/12/world/meast/who-is-the-isis/index.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/11/abu-bakr-al-baghdadi_n_5484945.html
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/03/confirmed-us-shipping-weapons-to-syria.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2655977/ISIS-militants-march-Baghdad-trademark-bullet-head-gets-way-control-north.html