Posted on 09/27/2006 12:38:22 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Robert A. Pape is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of the forthcoming Cato Institute paper "Suicide Terrorism and Democracy: What We've Learned since 9/11."
The attacks of September 11th, 2001 brought us face to face with the horror of suicide terrorism. In the years since, pundits have painted al Qaeda as a fearless enemy motivated by insatiable religious hatred. Amid prognostications of doom, we lost sight of the truth: that suicide terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, and that beneath the religious rhetoric with which it is perpetrated, it occurs largely in the service of secular aims. Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism.
Al Qaeda is a paradoxical entity: a group with territorial concerns but no territory of its own. It came about in response to the presence of thousands of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula after 1990, and recruited terrorists for suicide missions with the primary aim of forcing them out. Though it speaks of Americans as infidels, al Qaeda is less concerned with converting us to Islam than removing us from Arab and Muslim lands, and it was in this cause that it attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11.
Above all, Al Qaeda seeks to coerce democratic governments into changing their foreign policies. Since 2001, it has achieved a significant degree of success in dividing the West, by concentrating on vulnerable U.S. allies like France, Germany and Turkey, attacking tourists and foreign workers from north Africa to Indonesia.
There is no better way to understand the enemy than to listen to how it recruits new suicide bombers to kill us. In July, Al Qaeda released its most recent recruitment video, encouraging Muslims to carry out new attacks similar to the July 7 bombings in London last year. The video is stunning in its absence of religious declamation.
The first speaker is Shehzad Tanweer, one of the actual 7/7 bombers, who explains that he intended to punish "the non-Muslims of Britain" because "your government has openly supported the genocide of over 15,000 innocent Muslims in Fallujah," the site of a major Western military operation in Iraq in 2004.
The second speaker is Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's second in command, who reiterates that "Shehzad's motivation was the repression which the British are perpetrating in Iraq" and other Muslim countries.
Finally, the main event: Adam Gadahn, a 28-year old American citizen, born of Jewish and Christian parents, who converted to Islam as a teenager and has lived with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 1998. Gadahn is the new voice -- and new weapon -- of Al Qaeda. In his long recruitment appeal, he never mentions 72 virgins or the benefits Islamic martyrs receive in Heaven. Instead, he speaks to an earthly motive: revenge for Western military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I know [Western combat forces] killed and maimed civilians in their strikes because I've seen it with my own eyes ... I've carried the victims in my arms: women, children, toddlers, babies in their mother's wombs," Gadahn says. "When we bomb their cities and civilians like they bomb ours, or destroy their infrastructure and means of transportation like they destroy ours ... they should blame no one but themselves. Because they are the ones who started this dirty war and they are the ones who will end it ... by pulling out of our region and keeping their hands out of our affairs."
To make sense of Al Qaeda's campaign against the United States and its allies, I compiled data on the 71 terrorists who took their own lives carrying out attacks sponsored by Osama bin Laden's network between 1995 and 2004. These men are drawn from two groups: those who feel harmed and humiliated by foreign military occupation, and those who identify with the plight of a kindred ethnic group under foreign occupation.
Although British authorities thwarted last month's airliner attack plot, the arrest and detention of two dozen individuals in the U.K. reveals that Al Qaeda continues to draw strength from disaffected European Muslims, whose anger over Western combat operations in Muslim lands motivates them to take up arms. If it could no longer draw recruits from the Muslim countries where there is an American and Western combat presence, however, the remaining transnational network would pose a far smaller threat.
From 2002 to the end of 2005, Al Qaeda carried out over 17 suicide and other terrorist bombings, killing nearly 700 people – more attacks and victims than in all the years before 9/11 combined. Most Americans would like to believe that Western counter-terrorism efforts have weakened al Qaeda, but by the measure that counts – the ability of the group to kill us – it is stronger today than it was before 9/11.
We must understand that suicide terrorism results more from foreign occupation than Islamic fundamentalism, and conduct the war accordingly.
This article appeared in the Chicago Tribune on September 11, 2006.
Their preliminary finding is politically explosive: it's their "holy book" the Quran after all, according to intelligence briefings obtained by WND.
In public, the U.S. government has made an effort to avoid linking the terrorist threat to Islam and the Quran while dismissing suicide terrorists as crazed heretics who pervert Islamic teachings.
"The terrorists distort the idea of jihad into a call for violence and murder," the White House maintains in its recently released "National Strategy for Combating Terrorism" report.
But internal Pentagon briefings show intelligence analysts have reached a wholly different conclusion after studying Islamic scripture and the backgrounds of suicide terrorists. They've found that most Muslim suicide bombers are in fact students of the Quran who are motivated by its violent commands – making them, as strange as it sounds to the West, "rational actors" on the Islamic stage.
In Islam, it is not how one lives one's life that guarantees spiritual salvation, but how one dies, according to the briefings. There are great advantages to becoming a martyr. Dying while fighting the infidels in the cause of Allah reserves a special place and honor in Paradise. And it earns special favor with Allah.
"Suicide in defense of Islam is permitted, and the Islamic suicide bomber is, in the main, a rational actor," concludes a recent Pentagon briefing paper titled, "Motivations of Muslim Suicide Bombers."
(Read more at WND)
Who would have thunk it...they're suicide bombers because they're Islamic extremists.
Fair enough. Occam's razor is a pretty effective tool with issues like this, but we'll dig a little deeper.
There are many reasons, independant of territorial concerns, that would explain an increase in suicide bombings in Iraq. First, it might be closer to the bombers, thereby making it easier for them to bomb (it's much harder to slip a terrorist with explosives into the US... plus, the closer to the bad guys, the more of them that will be able/willing to attack).
Rather than risk repeating myself, please reference post 80.
In addition, I'll point out that many of the suicide bombers in Iraq have traveled from places as far as Pakistan, Morocco, and central Africa, and on their own dime. They could make it, if not to America itself, than to somewhere adjacent with lax borders (if there were such a place) and either slip across, or attack the first outpost they ran across.
If they attack checkpoints in Ramadi after flying in from Algeria, certainly they could have hit one San Diego border station by now? The bar is slightly higher, but it's still quite feasible, and would have a far greater impact, if you're motivated by sheer anti-American religious fanaticism, and not a sense of cultural and territorial defense.
Or the terrorists might see suicide bombing as a more viable tactic (based on local conditions) there than here.
It's a viable tactic only insofar as you can motivate people to do it. The materials can be bought or smuggled for close to nothing, and assembled with information available on the internet. Once you have willing subjects, you're 95% of the way there.
The equipment is the easy part. There's no reason you have to ship the bombers with the bombs. That's not how they do it in Iraq, so there's no reason they'd want to do it here. You'd have one cell that's responsible for making the vests or VBIEDs, and another that facilitates travel. Again, this can be done for almost as little money here as it is in Iraq, and would have considerable greater impact.
There are many plausible explanations for the increase in suicide bomobings in Iraq that have little to do with territorial concerns (especially since many of the terrorists and bombers are being shipped in to Iraq in the first place...).
First off, no suicide bombers are "shipped" to Iraq. They travel to adjacent countries under their own means, or paid for by others after being recruited, link up with smuggling networks, and are handed off to the VBIED cells after crossing the border. We've intercepted large numbers of potential suicide bombers, and their debriefings are pretty consistent.
In many cases, they're basically spending their life savings to get to Iraq to blow up Americans. That's an act clearly grounded in fanaticism, but real fanatics would want to attack the threat at it's roots, not at the leaves. If they hate America, why in every case are they going to Iraq to attack us? Does Tunisia not have an American embassy they could attack? It's not like security there is more tight than an armed Humvee patrol in Fallujah.
Black market bombs are available anywhere in the Middle East, and homemade ones are available anywhere you have an internet connection, some cash and some time on your hands.
There's no plausible explanation why U.S. interests aren't attacked everywhere in the Middle East (or where there are Muslims) with the same rate of incidence that they are in Iraq.
Or the increase in attacks might be a sign that the terrorists are afraid their religious, cultural, or political goals are in danger of failing, and they could be a sign of desparation.
Careful. You're getting dangerously close to the truth, FRiend.
The Japanese didn't start the war with banzai charges and kamikazes; only after their supplies and escape routes were cut off or when they had run out of trained pilots did they resort to suicide attacks.
So, the Japanese didn't start with the banzai charges and kamikazes? They only came into play when they were losing, and the Japanese home islands were in danger? Their home territory? That sounds like you're awfully close to making my point for me, doesn't it?
It is your job to prove that their motivation is purely territorial, which so far you have shown little persuasive evidence for...
That's what I have you here for. I'm glad you picked up on the kamikaze attacks being defensive in nature. Even though the phenomenons of suicide bombing jihadists and Imperial Japanese pilots were very different in culture and philosophy, they had two things in common. They were both fanatics, and they both were triggered by territorial instincts.
It's not purely territorial. I never said that. You need to have the key ingredient of fanaticism as well, or there's no platform for the suicidal rage to stand on. You'll just wind up with people who will risk death to fight back, not leap into it's mouth intentionally.
That's the key issue. Fanaticism is the foundation of the suicide attack, but it's not triggered without a sense of territorial threat. The 9/11 pilots are the only real exception to the rule, and even they would tell you that they were responding to world-conqueraing American cultural aggression and all that crap. In the vast majority of cases, it needs to be a clear, concrete territorial issue, not an abstract one.
What are your questions? You're clearly too smart a guy to avoid figuring it out on your own, even though you don't like where the answer is taking you.
*Long winded SVBIED ping*
Here you go...
A jewel of a thought: that suicide bombing is the last resort of the defenders; not a genuine offensive tactic at all.
The implications are significant, but not immediately clear. I'll have to think about this.
For the same reason there were more in the Pacific in 1945 than their were in 1940.
Afghans aren't Arabs. I'd bet it's Arabs doing the suicide bombing in Afghanistan as well, not Afghans.
The root is Islam. What is Islam? Yes, it is a religion, but more than that...it is a political blueprint for world domination. So, the whole world is Islamic territory. All of it. And there are parts of the Middle East that the terrorists would say was occupied by foreigners, and I'm not talking Israel or Iraq.
They were given a very clear mandate in the Qu'ran to dominate and not be dominated. Yet, they are being dominated. So, they cling harder the to Qu'ran and its message and fight with more determination against that occupation. That is what drives them.
It is easy to glibly say they resent us because we occupy their land... to do so misses the whole point of the conflict.
For the same reason there were more in the Pacific in 1945 than their were in 1940.
You're on the right track, Ditto. What was that reason?
You could bet that, but overall, you'd be wrong. Afghans and Pakistanis so far, athough there may be some Arabs in the mix. It's certainly an Arab tactic that's recently been adopted by the locals. Here's some info on (that). A quick googling of the Afgan suicide attacks will show that the nationalities, when known, have thus far been mostly local.
Have you seen that "poll" on the opinion of Iraqis on Alqeda? The biggest deterrent is social ostracism. Enforcement with consequences also reduces the lure and appeal of antisocial activity. There are many things one could threaten a suicide bomber with. How about a Vengeful Virgins vendetta? :)
Are you saying that these people don't consider themselves to be committing suicide? Because that's entirely incorrect. They know exactly what they're doing, what effect it will have, and why.
The root is Islam. What is Islam? Yes, it is a religion, but more than that...it is a political blueprint for world domination. So, the whole world is Islamic territory. All of it.
The whole world is not Islamic territory, under the concepts laid out in Islamic law. There is the Dar al Salaam, which is the House of Peace. Those are lands that are Islamic, or have been otherwise conquered or populated by Muslims. Then, there is the Dar al Harb, the House of War. That's pretty much everywhere else. While the goal of Islam is ultimately to spread across the world and make everything the Dar al Salaam, that's by no means already happened. Even hard core fanatics like bin Laden don't think that.
One day, the whole world will be Islamic territory, but even they don't think so yet.
They were given a very clear mandate in the Qu'ran to dominate and not be dominated. Yet, they are being dominated. So, they cling harder the to Qu'ran and its message and fight with more determination against that occupation. That is what drives them.
That's fine, but you could easily change 'in the Qu'ran' to read 'by the Emperor' and make this a statement about kamikaze pilots. It's still a fanatic-based response triggered by a territorial threat.
The Qu'ran isn't a book that people read, and then go crazy. They're still people, with normal human instincts and human nature at the helm. Their religious beliefs make them susceptible to act in monstrous ways, but these actions are by no means alien or incomprehensible.
It is easy to glibly say they resent us because we occupy their land... to do so misses the whole point of the conflict.
If you ask them, there's nothing glib about it. They're serious enough to get behind the wheel of a jihadist lowrider that's been on MTV's "VBIED my ride" and hit the streets. That may require a fanatical mindset, but you're not going to hear "BANZAI!" until you're in their backyard.
2)So, you said exactly what I have said. That in the Qu'ran...the whole world is to be dominated by Islam. So, in the 7th and 8th century, while they were well on their way to accomplishing their goal... they divided the world into two parts. What they had and what they still had to get.
3) Your third point is psychobabble.
4) I wasn't glibly talking about the terrorists. I was talking about Robert Pape's point that it was our occupation of Iraq that has caused the increase. Of course it has, but there is more to it than the reasons he laid out in his article. He is only looking at the fruit of it. He missed the root of the conflict.
One more thing... do not miss the main thrust of my post about occupation. There are places in the Middle East that the terrorists consider occupied by foreigners. Places such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States. They look at those governments as imperialist outposts from the Mandate period that is still being propped up by foreign power. To Bin Ladin, Islam needs to reassert itself in these places as well.
You're half kidding, but you're right on the money. Most fanatics need the approval of their society to do something like this. We know that names of martyrs are celebrated as brave Arab resistance fighters, and that their families are generally given great prestige and honor (and often cash) when a shaheed blows himself up.
Even though the host governments where these people are recruited punish those who would openly advocate it, in many cases public opinion is firmly behind the bombers. Even state controlled Arab media semi-unintentionally plays into this, by casting Americans in a more negative light than suicide bombers.
Psychologically, one of the things that's a common thread between the average suicide bombers is that they felt unimportant and helpless back home, and feared they'd never amount to anything. Being a suicide bomber is the only way these guys felt they could ever do anything and be remembered by their people as having attained true greatness.
So, you're exactly right. If these people felt that they would not be remembered as heroes, but as villains, they wouldn't do it. They thrive on the moral support their communities give them.
Thanks. I'll have to check that out.
They call it a number of things. One is a 'wedding', a term first seen in the classic Battle of Algiers, (which was AMZ's favorite movie) which means an 'operation'. Another is shaheed, a martyr, one who dies for the cause. VBIED cells use a number of derogatory terms, the most neutral being 'drivers'.
They do consider it a legitimate form of warfare. They don't think that dropping a bomb on a house from 30,000 feet is playing fair, and we don't think suicide bombings are fair. As the terrorist leader in the movie above mentioned, when accused of being a coward for planting bombs in baskets, "We use baskets for the same reason you use bombers. Because we have them. Trade us your bombers, and you can have our baskets"
2)So, you said exactly what I have said. That in the Qu'ran...the whole world is to be dominated by Islam. So, in the 7th and 8th century, while they were well on their way to accomplishing their goal... they divided the world into two parts. What they had and what they still had to get.
No, you said that the whole world IS Islamic territory. That's a very important distinction when we're talking about a tactic inspired by territorial issues. If you misspoke earlier, than we are in agreement.
3) Your third point is psychobabble.
Let me show you what I was talking about, by rephrasing your comment.
They were given a very clear mandate by the Emperor to dominate and not be dominated. Yet, they are being dominated. So, they cling harder the words of the Emperor and fight with more determination against the Allied invasion. That is what drives them.
Does that make more sense?
4) I wasn't glibly talking about the terrorists. I was talking about Robert Pape's point that it was our occupation of Iraq that has caused the increase. Of course it has, but there is more to it than the reasons he laid out in his article.
Such as?
He is only looking at the fruit of it. He missed the root of the conflict.
That's not the point at all. No one is saying that fanaticism and territorialism are divorced in this suicide bombing phenomenon. Only that to get this effect, you need to have a fanatical mindset, and then be faced with a territorial threat.
If you're merely a fanatic, you won't conduct suicide attacks on territory you don't consider yours. Aside from 9/11, it's unheard of. Even then, the hijackers used a twisted version of cultural self defense to rationalize their attacks. That's a very esoteric viewpoint that very, very few people can be sold on to the point of their own deaths. For most, territorial defense involves the land of their people.
If you're faced with a territorial threat, but you're not a fanatic, then you'll form resistance movements, fight a guerilla war, and take your chances. You'll fight back and risk death, but you won't fling yourself into the fire just to make a point. Normal resistance fighters want to win so they can enjoy what they had before. Even in desperate times, when a vital 'suicide mission' is proposed, it's usually not suicide per se, but a mission with very low odds of survival.
Non fanatics can be talked into that kind of risk if the stakes are high enough. You need a real die hard to do the job if the odds of survival are zero.
I personally think that is a pile of crap. They are talking about restoring the caliphate (Iberia) and then expanding it to the rest of the world. It is the Fourth World War (Cold War being the Third) for the total domination of the planet under the caliphate. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In the end, Islam will triumph or perish. It cannot co-exist with the infidel.
Life in prison, with Hitlery Clinton and Helen Thomas as cellmates.
Having a sellout dictator isn't the same as having a foriegn tank battalion in your backyard.
Places such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States. They look at those governments as imperialist outposts from the Mandate period that is still being propped up by foreign power.
There's really no connection to the colonial era governments and the present day ones, as a matter of public opinion. Arabs generally agree that they have bad government, but it's a far different thing to have rulers afraid of the Western powers and to have rulers controlled by them. They know which is which.
The people think that their leaders are cowards, apostates and sellouts for failing to oppose the West, but they don't think of them as foriegners. They certainly don't see themselves as occupied.
To Bin Ladin, Islam needs to reassert itself in these places as well.
In Arabic, there is a famous saying to the effect that, "Islam is the tent, the ruler is the pole, and the people are the pegs." So, Islam, per se, is in all of these place. It's not the state of the tent that bin Laden is upset about. It's the pole. Dictators are perfectly compatible under Islam, and are almost a specific requirement for sharia. The Middle East has no shortage of dicatators. For bin Laden to be satisfied, they have to be Islamic dictators.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.