On a mountainside in Afghanistan in 1997, Osama bin Laden made a prediction to the veteran journalist Robert Fisk. From the remote camps where he was building his movement, bin Laden gestured at the landscape and declared: “From this mountain upon which you are sitting, we broke the Russian army and we destroyed the Soviet Union. And I pray to God that he will permit us to turn the United States into a shadow of itself”. Four years later, the attacks of September 11, 2001, brought that ambition into terrible focus. But bin Laden understood something that the American foreign policy establishment—with its satellites, its predator drones, and its rapidly expanding counterterrorism bureaucracy—would spend the next two decades learning: the superpower would not be destroyed by a single blow, however spectacular. It would be destroyed by its own response.
Bin Laden had studied the Soviet collapse in Afghanistan. He had watched a superpower bleed itself white in a war it could neither win nor leave, its domestic consensus fracturing, its economy buckling under military expenditure, its public faith in the project of empire exhausted. His strategy for the United States was identical: provoke America into a perpetual war with the Islamic world, and let the internal contradictions of that war—the cost, the moral compromise, the erosion of democratic norms—bring the republic down from within. He was, in his fashion, a student of asymmetrical warfare, and he understood that the most powerful weapon in his arsenal was not the box-cutter but the American overreaction.
Twenty-five years later, the United States has not been invaded or conquered. Its cities stand. Its institutions, though battered, survive. And yet something remarkable has happened. The strategy that bin Laden devised in those Afghan camps, the provocation that he launched with such diabolical precision, has found its most faithful executor not in the caves of Tora Bora but in the White House. Donald Trump is completing what Osama bin Laden began. And if the president—prodded by the Iran-obsessed hawks who have surrounded him—leads America into a war with Iran, bin Laden will have won his victory at last.
The Making of an Enemy: Sayyid Qutb and the Roots of Anti-American JihadJihad jihad The Arabic term meaning ‘struggle’ or ‘effort’, used in Islamic theology to refer to both the internal spiritual struggle against sin and the external military struggle in defence of the faith. In contemporary political usage it is most often associated with the latter meaning, specifically armed struggle against non-Muslim rule or influence. In classical Islamic jurisprudence, jihad encompasses a range of meanings from the internal striving to be a better Muslim (often called the ‘greater jihad’) to the collective obligation of armed defence of the Muslim community (the ‘lesser jihad’). The political history of the term’s modern transformation is inseparable from the anti-colonial struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which Islamic scholars and political leaders used jihad to mobilise resistance against European occupation of Muslim-majority lands. The contemporary association of jihad primarily with violent struggle is partly the result of the deliberate promotion of a particular interpretation by Salafi-jihadist organisations from the 1970s onward, and partly the result of Western media usage that narrowed the term’s meaning. In the works of ideologues like Sayyid Qutb and Abdullah Azzam, jihad was reframed as an individual obligation (fard ‘ayn) — applying to every Muslim — rather than a collective one directed by legitimate authorities, removing the institutional checks that classical jurisprudence had placed on its invocation. This reframing, combined with the Soviet-Afghan War experience and then the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, produced the jihadist movement as it is understood today. The analytical challenge with jihad in contemporary discourse is distinguishing between description and definition: using the term to describe a wide range of violent and non-violent Islamic political movements risks conflating organisations with radically different goals, methods, and social bases, while restricting it to violent extremism ignores the legitimate theological and political traditions the term encompasses. The term’s politicisation — by jihadist organisations that use it to claim universal Islamic sanction for their violence, and by Western politicians and media who use it to associate all Islamic political activism with terrorism — has made genuine analysis more difficult. For students of history, the more productive question is always specific: which organisation, in what context, pursuing what political goals through what means, funded and supported by whom? The word ‘jihad’ is a starting point for inquiry, not a conclusion.
To understand the ideology that shaped bin Laden, one must begin not in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan but in Greeley, Colorado, in the late 1940s. There, at a small teachers college on the Great Plains, an Egyptian literary critic named Sayyid Qutb spent two years studying American education. It was a sojourn that would change the course of history.
Sayyid Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, sent by the Egyptian Ministry of Education in what was partly an effort to remove him from the increasingly radical political currents of Cairo. He was a man of the old world: courtly, fastidious, deeply devout. What he found in America horrified him. He wrote with disgust of the American obsession with sports, the brutishness of football players, the way Americans salted their watermelon and watered their lawns. He despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. But what truly appalled him—what would become the foundation of his theology of jihad—was what he saw as the moral emptiness at the heart of American life.
“The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity,” Qutb wrote. “She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it”. The young women of Greeley, dancing at church socials and reading magazines, became for Qutb the emblem of a civilization that had abandoned all spiritual value for the pursuit of pleasure. He saw in America not just a political enemy but a civilizational one—a culture so powerful in its material seductions that it threatened to drown the Islamic world in its decadence.
Qutb returned to Egypt in 1951 and over the next decade and a half, much of it spent in prison under Gamal Abdel NasserNasser nasser Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70), President of Egypt from 1956 to 1970, who nationalised the Suez Canal, championed pan-Arab nationalism, and became the most charismatic and influential Arab leader of the twentieth century. His political legacy is inseparable from the 1967 military catastrophe that destroyed the pan-Arab project he embodied. Nasser came to power through the 1952 Free Officers’ coup that overthrew King Farouk, gradually consolidating his authority against other military figures to emerge as undisputed leader by 1954. His nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July 1956, in response to the American and British withdrawal of financing for the Aswan High Dam, triggered the Suez Crisis and the failed British-French-Israeli military intervention — which American pressure forced to end, turning apparent military defeat into political triumph. Nasser emerged from Suez as the champion of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism, the voice who had defied the old colonial powers. His popularity extended across the Arab world; his radio broadcasts reached millions, and his pan-Arab vision — summarised in the 1958 merger with Syria to form the United Arab Republic — seemed to be reshaping the region. The UAR’s collapse in 1961, the ruinous Yemen intervention from 1962, and above all the 1967 war — in which Israel destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian air forces in six days and occupied the Sinai, Gaza, West Bank, and Golan Heights — dismantled the pan-Arab project. Nasser died in 1970, having resigned after 1967 and been persuaded back to office by mass popular demonstrations; his funeral drew an estimated five million people into the streets of Cairo. Nasser’s legacy is the most instructive failure in Arab politics of the twentieth century — instructive because it was so close to success. He genuinely represented something: the aspiration of Arab peoples for dignity, independence, and self-determination after a century of colonial domination. He was not a cynical manipulator but a believer in his own project, which made the failure more devastating for those who shared the belief. The lessons his failure offers are multiple: that charismatic leadership without institutional development produces fragile states; that military officers as political rulers tend to plan for military solutions to political problems; that pan-Arab solidarity cannot override the specific interests of specific states; and that a political project premised on a great victory (Suez) collapses catastrophically when the victory is reversed (1967). The Arab world after Nasser — fragmented, authoritarian, increasingly Islamist in its disillusionment with secular nationalism — is in important respects his political inheritance.’s secular regime, he developed the intellectual framework that would become the foundation of modern Islamist militancy. He argued that the modern world—not just the West, but also the secular regimes of the Muslim world—represented a return to jahiliyya, the state of ignorance that existed before the revelation of the Quran. True Muslims, he argued, must withdraw from this corrupt society and prepare for jihad against it. His 1964 work Milestones became the manifesto of radical Islamism, a call to holy war against both the Western powers and the Muslim rulers who had betrayed their faith.
Qutb was executed by Nasser’s government in 1966. But his ideas did not die with him. His brother Muhammad fled to Saudi Arabia, where he became a professor at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. Among his students was a young man from one of the kingdom’s wealthiest families: Osama bin Laden. The intellectual line from Greeley, Colorado, to the attacks on New York and Washington is direct and unbroken.
The Gulf War: The Turning Point
For a time, bin Laden and the United States were on the same side. Throughout the 1980s, bin Laden funneled money, equipment, and recruits to the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. So did the Central Intelligence Agency. Both were fighting the same enemy, and bin Laden’s admiration for the Afghan fighters who had, with American support, broken the Red Army was immense. “It cleared from Muslim minds the myth of superpowers,” he later told an interviewer. “The youth ceased seeing America as a superpower”.
But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring peace. Instead, it brought the 1991 Gulf War—and the decision that bin Laden would later describe as the catalyst for his hatred of the United States.
When Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait in August 1990, bin Laden saw an opportunity. He went to the Saudi royal family with a proposal: he would raise an army of mujahedeen veterans to defend the kingdom. It was, in his mind, a religious duty. The land of the Two Holy Mosques should not be defended by infidel armies. But the Saudis demurred. They turned instead to the United States, which assembled a coalition of half a million soldiers to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
For bin Laden, the decision was an unforgivable betrayal. The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia—the land of Mecca and Medina—was a desecration. He railed against the “infidel” soldiers stationed in the holy land, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to drive them out. In his 1998 interview with ABC, he was explicit: “Allah ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-believers, and especially the Arabian Peninsula”. The edict he co-signed that year declared it the duty of all Muslims to kill Americans, civilian and military alike.
The Gulf War, then, was the war before the war. It planted the seeds of Al Qaeda, gave bin Laden his defining grievance, and set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in the attacks of September 11. But bin Laden had another objective, one more subtle and more ambitious than the destruction of a few buildings. He wanted to lure the United States into a war it could not win, a perpetual conflict that would bleed the superpower white.
The Provocation and Its Reward: Afghanistan and Iraq
When bin Laden succeeded in provoking the United States into war, he must have been almost giddy with satisfaction. The response to 9/11 was precisely what he had hoped for: American troops poured into Afghanistan, then into Iraq, then into a global “war on terror” that showed no sign of ending. The United States, which could have responded with surgical strikes and intelligence operations, instead launched two ground wars, occupied two Muslim countries, and created the conditions for the rise of ISIS.
Bin Laden had learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. He understood that a superpower with an all-volunteer army, a tax-averse population, and a short attention span could not sustain a long war. He understood that the American public would eventually tire of casualties and cost. He understood that the collateral damage of modern warfare—the civilian deaths, the torture at Abu Ghraib, the drone strikes that killed weddings and funerals—would generate a perpetual stream of new recruits for his movement. And he understood that the United States, in its fury, would abandon the very principles it claimed to defend.
By 2016, when Donald Trump launched his campaign for the presidency, the American project in the Middle East was already in ruins. Iraq was a failed state, Afghanistan was stalemated, and the American public was exhausted. Trump did not create this exhaustion; he rode it to the White House. But he brought something else with him: the Islamophobia that 9/11 had seeded in the American psyche, and that he had been cultivating for years.
The Politics of Fear: Trump and the Muslims of New Jersey
In the weeks after 9/11, Donald Trump told a local New Jersey newspaper that he had seen “thousands and thousands of people” in Jersey City celebrating the attacks. “They were cheering over there,” he said. The story was false. Police departments across New Jersey, including Jersey City’s, denied that any such celebrations had occurred. But the lie was useful. It allowed Trump to position himself as the defender of a besieged America, the only one willing to speak truth about the Muslim threat.
Fifteen years later, Trump would deploy that same lie to launch his presidential campaign. In December 2015, after the San Bernardino attack, he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. He suggested that mosques should be surveilled and Muslim Americans forced to register in government databases. He praised Ted Cruz’s proposal to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods”. He told the Washington Post editorial board that “I just don’t think we can take people in when we have no idea who they are, where they come from”.
For Muslim Americans in New Jersey, where the state’s 3 percent Muslim population is among the largest in the nation, Trump’s rhetoric was not just offensive but terrifying. Essma Bengabsia, an 18-year-old from New Jersey, told the Medill News Service that Trump’s claims about Muslims celebrating on 9/11 were deeply wounding. “We were affected by it like everyone else,” she said. “We cry over our family members, as well, who passed away”. Others described children coming home from school frightened, women afraid to wear headscarves, entire communities wondering if their place in America was secure.
The irony—and it is the central irony of the Trump era—is that the Islamophobia Trump exploited was itself a product of the 9/11 attacks that bin Laden had orchestrated. Bin Laden had wanted to turn Americans against Muslims, to create a cycle of provocation and retaliation that would radicalize both sides. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The candidate who rode that Islamophobia to the White House was not a neoconservative hawk like John McCain or a compassionate conservative like George W. Bush. He was a man who promised to ban Muslims, surveil mosques, and withdraw from the world—except for the wars he promised to win.
The Hawks and Their Obsession: John Bolton and the Fifty-Year War on Iran
If Trump’s Islamophobia gave him a path to power, it is the Iran hawks who have surrounded him who may yet complete bin Laden’s work. Chief among them is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, a man whose obsession with regime change in Iran predates 9/11 by two decades.
Bolton’s hatred of the Islamic RepublicIslamic Republic
Short Description (Excerpt):The unique form of government established after the revolution. It is a hybrid system combining elements of a modern parliamentary democracy (elections, president, parliament) with a theocratic guardianship (Supreme Leader, Guardian Council).
Full Description:The Islamic Republic was the outcome of the referendum in 1979. While it has the trappings of a republic, ultimate power resides with the unelected religious leadership. The constitution explicitly subordinates the will of the people to the principles of Islam as interpreted by the Supreme Leader.
Critical Perspective:This dual structure creates a permanent institutional conflict. The tension between the “republican” mandate (popular sovereignty) and the “Islamic” mandate (divine sovereignty) results in a system where elected officials are often powerless to implement change if it contradicts the interests of the clerical elite. It represents an experiment in “religious democracy” that critics argue is inherently contradictory.
Read more has deep roots. The 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah, seized the American embassy, and held 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days created a wound in the American psyche that has never fully healed. For conservatives of a certain generation, the humiliation of the hostage crisis was a trauma that demanded retribution. The Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. The George W. Bush administration included Iran in the “axis of evil.” But Bolton has always wanted more.
In July 2017, Bolton told a gathering of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) in Paris that “before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!” The MEK is a strange vehicle for American foreign policy. It is a cult-like organization, designated as a terrorist group by the State Department until 2012, that fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Iran during the bloody Iran-Iraq warIran-Iraq War
Short Description (Excerpt):A brutal eight-year conflict (1980–1988) initiated by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran. While devastating, the war inadvertently strengthened the Islamic Republic, allowing it to suppress internal dissent under the guise of wartime patriotism.
Full Description:The Iran-Iraq War was one of the 20th century’s bloodiest conflicts, featuring trench warfare and the use of chemical weapons. Saddam aimed to seize oil-rich territory and crush the revolutionary threat next door. Instead, Iran mobilized a massive volunteer force (“human waves”) fueled by religious fervor to defend the revolution.
Critical Perspective:Khomeini famously called the war a “divine blessing.” It allowed the regime to militarize society and label any political opposition as treason. The war forged the identity of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and entrenched the narrative of Iran as a besieged fortress of Islam fighting against a corrupt world, a narrative that sustains the state to this day.
Read more—a betrayal that most Iranians, whatever they think of the clerical regime, have not forgotten. The MEK has been accused of paying Bolton at least $180,000 in “speaker fees,” raising questions about how a man with such close ties to a former terrorist organization could receive a White House security clearance.
Bolton’s hostility to Iran is not merely a matter of policy; it is an obsession. He has long argued for regime change in Tehran, and his appointment as national security adviser in 2018 brought him closer than ever to achieving that goal. Under his influence, Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, imposed crushing sanctions, and came close to war on multiple occasions.
In May 2019, as tensions with Iran escalated, the Trump administration deployed an aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf. Officials insisted that the deployment was a response to intelligence about Iranian threats, but the signal was unmistakable: the United States was preparing for war. When a reporter asked Trump whether Bolton was leading him toward conflict, Trump replied that he “moderates” Bolton—a claim that drew derisive laughter from those who had followed Bolton’s career.
The Trap: Iran and the Final Act
A war with Iran would be bin Laden’s final victory. It would be, as even some of Bolton’s critics acknowledge, a disaster of unprecedented proportions. The cost would be measured in trillions of dollars, in thousands of American lives, in the destabilization of the entire Middle East. It would give Iran, which has spent decades preparing for such a conflict, the opportunity to strike American targets across the region and close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. And it would validate bin Laden’s central insight: that the United States, once provoked, cannot help but overreact.
Bin Laden did not want the United States to withdraw from the Middle East. He wanted it to stay, to fight, to bleed. He understood that a long war would expose the contradictions in American society, would radicalize a new generation of Muslims, would erode the civil liberties that the United States claimed to defend. He understood that the republic, for all its power, could not sustain a perpetual state of war without destroying itself.
In the decades since 9/11, the United States has come close to fulfilling bin Laden’s prophecy. It has spent trillions of dollars on wars that have achieved nothing. It has created the conditions for the rise of ISIS. It has tortured prisoners, surveilled its own citizens, and abandoned the principles of international law. And now it has elected a president who rode Islamophobia to power, who promises to ban Muslims from entering the country, who surrounds himself with men like John Bolton, and who may yet lead the nation into the war that bin Laden always wanted.
The tragedy is that bin Laden’s strategy might have failed. The United States could have responded to 9/11 with a different approach: targeted strikes, intelligence operations, a careful campaign against Al Qaeda that did not involve the occupation of Muslim countries. It could have rejected the temptation to lash out blindly, to abandon its principles in the name of security, to see Islam itself as the enemy. It could have proved bin Laden wrong.
Instead, it proved him right. And if Donald Trump, driven by the Islamophobia born of 9/11 and the Iran obsession of the hawks around him, leads the nation into war with Iran, he will complete what bin Laden began. He will give the man on the mountainside the victory he always longed for: the United States, reduced to a shadow of itself, exhausted by war, divided against itself, its principles abandoned, its power broken.
The 1997 interview with Fisk, bin Laden sat in the shade of a tent in Afghanistan and made his prophecy. The United States, he said, would be turned into a shadow of itself. Twenty-five years later, that prophecy is closer to fulfillment than anyone could have imagined. The question is whether the United States will walk into the final trap that bin Laden set, or whether it will finally learn the lesson that he spent his life trying to teach: that the way to lose a war is to fight it forever.
Image credit: Hamid Mir
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