To those of us in the West, the idea of killing oneself for the purpose of killing others and doing so for the goal of driving them from one’s country, is utterly foreign to our moral and ethical values. It is, however, a very effective weapon of the weak.
As you might imagine, suicide bombers are very angry people. To those of us in the West, the idea of killing oneself for the purpose of killing others and doing so for the goal of driving them from one’s country, is utterly foreign to our moral and ethical values. It is, however, a very effective weapon of the weak. It works.
The succession of suicide bombings in Iraq influenced the outcome of the recent U.S. election to the point where a majority of Americans have signaled the government that it is time, in their opinion, to leave Iraq. Prior to the 2003 “coalition” invasion, Iraq had never had a suicide terrorist attack in its history.
Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, is the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. He recently had an analysis published by the Cato Institute called “What We’ve Learned Since 9/11.” Policy wonks like myself read the Cato Analysis papers to get behind and beyond the daily headlines.
Pape understands the suicide bomber like few others so let me share some of his insights. “Suicide is an especially convincing signal of future intent because it suggests that the attackers could not have been deterred, and future attackers will not be, by a threat of costly retaliation.”
Put aside, for the moment, the dramatic 9/11 attacks. We know that the U.S. elected to inflict a costly retaliation on the Taliban in Afghanistan. They have returned and are once again waging a guerrilla war there. Just as they originally wanted the Russians out, now it is the Americans.
We did not, however, invade Iraq as the result of 9/11, although it was sold on the basis of a potential future attack on the U.S. homeland or its allies in the region. We attacked Iraq for the strategic reason that it would (1) depose a troublemaking dictator, (2) lure terrorists to a place where they could be killed, and (3) provide the U.S. with a military platform in the most important, strategic location in the Middle East.
Vital to understanding the action taken, there was clearly a perceived need to protect the West’s access to Iraq’s oil reserves as well as others in the region such as that of the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Bahrain, and United Arab Emirates, all of them Sunnis, and all of whom feared the Saddam Hussein regime and now fear Iran’s.
A relative handful of suicide bombers have successfully forced the U.S. to reevaluate its strategic goals, nor is it surprising that most attacks occur in Baghdad where they receive maximum media coverage; a media that is largely opposed to our objectives there.
Since the 1980s, the West has pulled back from military engagements, ranging from Lebanon, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia where our troops were garrisoned, and other places in the Middle East. Nations such as Spain and Great Britain whose troops were allied with the U.S. also experienced terrorist bombings.
“The data showed that all suicide terrorists campaigns have in common a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists value.”
Like 9/11, it is not the dregs of Islamic society committing these acts. As often as not, the bombers are educated members of the middle class. They are primarily motivated by a “deep anger over Western combat forces in the Persian Gulf region and other predominantly Muslim lands.”
The vast bulk of the suicide terrorists have been Saudis and this is understandable if one considers that it is the locus of Wahhabism, the most fundamentalist of Islamic sects.
“If al Qaeda no longer drew recruits from the Muslim countries where there is an American combat presence, the remaining transnational network would pose a far smaller threat and might well simply collapse.”
This requires one to ask the question of the value of keeping American and coalition troops in the region. Pape concludes that, “The longer this suicide terrorist campaign continues, the greater the risk of new attacks in the United States.”
The coup de gras he delivers is the view that, “Spreading democracy in the Middle East is not likely to be a panacea as long as foreign combat troops remain in the region. If not for the world’s obvious interest in Persian Gulf oil, the obvious solution might well be to simply to abandon the region altogether. Complete disengagement from the Middle East, however, is not possible.”
Welcome to that spot between a rock and a hard place. Benjamin Franklin famously once said that, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
We need to find that delicate balance between the protection of our interest in the flow of oil from the region and the forces competing for hegemony there. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but the failure to project our power will only create a vacuum that would swiftly be filled by Islamic extremists.
Middle Eastern nations have spawned a new, very long war between each other and, so long as we play soldier in their sandbox, one directed against the West as well. If we leave, does anyone believe it will get better?
I wrote an article in October (published on this website) in which I specifically rebutted all of the erroneous assertions found in this article. Let me rehash just a few:
The reason Iraq never had a suicide terror attack in its history prior to our invasion is that the regime of the Baathist tyrant brutally crushed any enemies of the state. In his research Pape himself states that Suicide attack is the last stage in a terror campaign and as Mia Bloom of the University of Cincinatti has pointed out “In instances where illiberal authoritarian regimes went head to head with opposition groups (before their strategies had advanced to include suicide bombing) these groups are eliminated.” In other words it was brutal repression that prevented suicide attacks in Iraq, not the absence of U.S. troops.
If the suicide bombers primary motivation is purely political, let Professor Pape and Mr. Caruba explain to me why the suicide terrorist attacks taking place in Iraq today are overwhelmingly Shia vs. Sunni and not Iraqi vs. Coalition. It is because their motivation is not to drive the Americans out of Iraq but to wage jihad against the apostates within Islam. They are motivated by the Koran not Clausewitz.
Professor Papes analysis is deeply flawed. It is corrupted by the typically anti-American, leftist-intellectual bias that afflicts nearly all academics and journalists. The data does not show “that all suicide terror campaigns” share the “same secular and strategic goal” of compelling democracies to withdraw military forces from their territory” as Pape asserts. This may be the goal of Marxist terrorists such as in Sri Lanka, but not of Islamic terrorists in Iraq or elsewhere whose goal is exactly what they say it is: to follow the Koran by waging jihad against apostates and infidels until the entire world become believers in Allah and his prophet.
He based his theory entirely on statistical data skewed by the actions of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (secular Marxists) while ignoring the words and actions of the Islamic terrorists with whom the whole world is dealing.
Pape is wrong. We cannot fall into the trap of basing national security decisions on the flawed conclusions drawn from incomplete research.
Mr. Osonitisch:
Pardon me for disagreeing. Pape is not simply wrong, he is pathetically wrong. What you have written in response is correct in spades. I also have written here and elsewhere extensively, not the least a lengthy book review on Knowing the Enemy, fairly clearly demonstrating the fatuousness of such arguments.
The real telling point is the one you make that these “intellectuals” wish to “interpret” the intentions of these murderous ideologues rather than take them at their word. It does seem that of all the groups one might suggest have been true to their word, it has been the Muslims.
I tend to avoid these types of responses to such silly analysis, but you emboldened me.
DY
“If al Qaeda no longer drew recruits from the Muslim countries where there is an American combat presence, the remaining transnational network would pose a far smaller threat and might well simply collapse.”
So how does Pape explain the al Qaeda attack that was carried out on 9/11/2001, fully 2 years before we had troops on the ground in Iraq, and no substantial buildup in any middle eastern country? Doesn’t seem like they were doing bad before we “provoked” this ire of the Arab world. Darn that pesky old history!
Mr. Mulligan,
I love how you try to pretend like you uncovered a huge contradiction or flaw in mentioning, “Darn that pesky history!” It is obvious to everyone, including people reading this blog that 9.11 was actually cause and provoke by America by its support for the brutal and oppresive Zionist Regime in Israel. All of the hijackers SAID this many times, and it is well known that the Palestinian cause is deeply felt by many Muslims around the world, and rightfully so. Too bad your “witty” response holds no merit whatsoever.
The problem with d17mn’s statement is that it is simply false.
Let’s examine it:
[1] If you read Know The Enemy, and my book review of it, which was in the main critical, you will note that ALL of the notions of Jihad and the anti-Western animus existed before there ever was a state of Israel or “Palestinians”.
[2] If the Muslim world is/was concerned for “Palestinians”, why did they not support a Palestinian State pre-1948. Rather, the Muslim world was fairly united in the view that either the Palestine Mandate territory belonged to a Pan-Arab nationalism where each of the leading proponents (Syria, Egypt, Hussein of Jordan) claimed the title of leader of the Pan-Arab nation or the notion that each of the surrounding newly minted Arab countries claimed all or part of Palestine as their own.
The notion of a Palestine national entity was fully rejected by the Arab nations at the time of the UN vote — they didn’t just reject the idea of the creation of Israel.
[3] Proof of the above is the fact that after the war in 1948 launched by the Arabs following the UN vote creating a two state “solution”, Jordan conquered all of the “West Bank” and Egypt Gaza. Both of these territories had been earmarked as the new Palestinian state by the UN Partition vote. From 1948 through June 1967, Egypt and Jordan annexed this territory as their own and refused to accept the notion of a Palestinian people. It wasn’t until the 1960s with Yasir Arafat’s PLO did there begin to be a real national political movement for the Palestinian Arabs.
So the idea that al Qaeda attacks the US because of the existence of the “Zionists” and that proof of this is that Muslims show concern for the Palestinian national cause is simply vacuous.
Now, all of this does not go to the claim that the Palestinians now make that that the Iranians make for them that the Jews should never have been granted a state by the UN simply because of the Holocaust. But that is a separate argument altogether. And, it would have to deal with the fact that there never was a “Palestinian” people until the 1960s. It just didn’t exist. You had Arabs living throughout the Ottoman Empire pre Mandate period (post WWI) that simply did not accept “nationalism” as an ideology. And of course, that is because neither Islam nor Arab tribalism accepts the idea of nation-states. The whole point of al Qaeda and the jihadists is that the Muslim people are one Umma (People) and that nation-states are a construct of the infidel West. Today, the only Arab proponents of western nation-states are the mostly secular tyrants who control the Muslim countries for their own benefit.