A Letter to Osama Bin Laden

by Daniel J. Monahan

Dear Osama:

With all your faculties of intelligence and reason, did you truly imagine that by killing the parents of thousands of innocent American children, somehow your genocidal plot would cause America to change its policies?

Perhaps you weren't concerned with changing American policies, but sought only to kill its countrymen to teach them the error of their ways. within all your faculties of intelligence and reason, wherefore then is insanity?

With your vast personal wealth and that of your many friends and allies, you could have provided so much for your people. Unlike poorer Arabs of the past, you possess the resources to provide education, industry, jobs, food, healthcare and humanitarian aid.

You could have bettered the way of life for millions of your Arab brethren, showering them with a life of peace, calm and good health unlike any they have ever known; the life I imagine Muhammad intended for his people.

You could have risen as an Ambassador of peace for all Arab nations, indeed, for all of modern Islam.

But instead of providing that broad philanthropists' love, instead of launching a revolution of peace and prosperity in the Middle East, you chose the path of weakness, the path of hate and ruin. You engineered the killing of thousands of innocent, decent people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the plight of your people; a plight that began long before America even existed.

Rather than provide shelter for your people from the hunger and wars they have known all too well for generations long since gone, you've provided them only more violence, more death, more fleeing from their homes into uncertainty.

Instead of providing a network of reform, you provide only a network of death soldiers commanded to prey on the innocent. Instead of teaching your people to farm and cultivate, you taught them to kill. Instead of providing food and shelter, you gave them bullets.

What kind of leader does this? What kind of leader robs his people of hope, providing them instead with only greater calamity and the continual fear of wars, deaths and broken families yet to be?

Osama, you could have been great in the eyes of the world. Instead, you're only a bloodthirsty terrorist, a harbinger of fear and torturous death.

Of all the great prophets spoken of by Muhammad, which of them advocated death? Which of them directed the murder of thousands?

Now that you have committed the deeds you have, you don't have the courage to stand before Allah and all mankind and admit what you have done. True to this self-evident cowardice, you remain in hiding, filtering off more money and grandiose ideas for even greater plots of murder and devastation.

Surely you will be damned for eternity before Allah, the very holy entity you seek to please. You can spend the rest of your time on Earth running and hiding from human retribution, but you will never escape Allah's wrath.

Osama, to what end comes your war?