Steve Coll
speaker
259 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 2 Sep
Steve Coll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He was a public figure who lectured, uh, who was seen as a veteran of a worthy cause, of a righteous cause in the name of Islam, and he belonged uh to a prestigious family.
Um yes, he came home uh
because the war he had fought in had reached um success by expelling the Soviets and had sort of devolved into a much more complicated civil war where there wasn't as much of a place for him.
And so he came home uh to talk about that and to talk about where the Muslim world should go from here.
Yes.
The pivotal event though follows the in nineteen ninety when uh Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait and starts a crisis that leads immediately to the deployment of tens and then hundreds of thousands of American, uh, British, French, and other international troops to Saudi Arabia while Osama is there, in order to defend the kingdom from the possibility that Saddam
Um uh and his forces would continue south from Kuwait into Saudi Arabia.
All correct.
So Osama had no sympathy for Saddam, uh and thought that it was right to expel him from Kuwait and to essentially end his rule in Iraq as well.
But he had advice for the Saudi government, which is that they should not be relying on apostate American, British, and French troops.
They should be relying on people like him, who after all, he had just expelled the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
He and
Brethren Mujahadeen, they had defeated a superpower that looked impregnable, and now another superpower was occupying the kingdom in the name of this uh cause of of expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
Red herring.
It's certainly one indicator among many that Saddam and Osama had and not much to do with one another and saw the world in very different ways.
And Osama literally wrote a memo of advice to the Saudi defense ministry, basically asking to be put in charge of the resistance against Saddam and any effort to harass his occupation of Kuwait, just as the Afghan
And Arab volunteers fighting the Soviets had harassed that occupation.
They have to be polite because he belongs to the bin Laden family, but you can hear their sniggering under their breath and and and attempt to control their mirth as he presents this idea.
First of all, it's implausible.
Second, the com the kingdom has already committed to an international defense and invited tens of thousands of troops.
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