Sunday, May 8, 2011

Obama, Osama and, er, Okuku have all changed the course of history

By MURITHI MUTIGA
Posted  Saturday, May 7 2011 at 17:09
In Summary
  • A fact: Certainly the actions of Okuku, Okindo and Matiko on the morning of August 7, 1998, changed the course of history in a bigger way than they could ever have anticipated

History is shaped by the most unlikely people. Osama bin Laden was a shy, religiously devout young man. He was a mediocre student; a millionaire’s son seemingly destined to an unremarkable existence.
Yet he managed to change the world. He rattled the global superpower, triggered two wars (that sent oil prices soaring), launched a multi-billion shilling security industry and caused directly or indirectly, the deaths of millions.
That was the thesis advanced by David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times in the wake of bin Laden’s death. He argued that it is impossible to predict the course of history because it is often driven by the actions of inexplicable individuals.
Here is an amendment to the theory. Osama bin Laden would have died a long time ago if it was not for the actions of an individual most of the world has never heard of — Benson Okuku Bwaku.
Okuku, Joash Okindo and Jomo Matiko were the duty guards at the US embassy in Nairobi on August 7, 1998, when two Saudi men drove up to the embassy gates with a truck bearing 500 cylinders packed with explosives.
Their attack did not go to plan. According to an FBI report on the bombings backed up by statements by bin Laden’s lieutenants, the intention of the attackers had been to limit Kenyan casualties and maximise the number of Americans killed.
They intended, according to one of the attackers — Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali  — to drive the truck into the compound and detonate it right next to the embassy so that the building took the full force of the blast.
They were aiming for a propaganda coup by killing as many Americans as possible including the female ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, whose death they believed would have attracted even more attention to the crime.
The plan failed due to the actions of Mr Okuku and his colleagues. When the truck was driven to the embassy, the driver and Al Owhali warned the guards to open the gates. Al Owhali jumped out of the vehicle and threw stun grenades to force the issue.
Mr Okuku, due to naivety, bravery or both, ran off instead. The barriers remained in place.
The bombers panicked and detonated the explosives outside the embassy. That is how far more Kenyans than Americans, including those going about their businesses at the neighbouring Ufundi House were killed.
It is not too great a leap of the imagination to suggest that if the operation had gone to plan and the truck had been allowed into the embassy, killing possibly hundreds of Americans, the Clinton administration’s response to the attacks would have been far more robust than it was.
According to the journalist Lawrence Wright’s award winning history of the organisation The Looming Tower, Al Qaeda’s Road to 9/11, the US president was exceedingly reluctant to grant orders to kill bin Laden in the weeks following the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam attacks.
The CIA and FBI believed they had tracked him down to his precise location in Afghanistan. They demanded authorisation to act but were rebuffed.
Domestic pressure
Instead, President Clinton, who at the time was under extreme domestic pressure due to the Monica Lewinsky saga, authorised the bombing of a chemical factory in Sudan, which he claimed was affiliated to al-Qaeda. That contention was later found to have been false.
Would the Americans have reacted so casually if the proportion of victims had been 200 Americans and 12 Kenyans dead rather than the reverse?
Did the US fail to get Osama, as numerous reports including the official 9/11 commission found they could have, because not enough Americans died on August 7, 1998?
Would al-Qaeda’s growth into the movement that caught world attention on September 11 have been stopped in 1998 if the attack had gone to plan?
We will never know, but certainly the actions of Okuku, Okindo and Matiko on the morning of August 7, 1998, changed the course of history in a bigger way than they could ever have anticipated.
mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com

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