"The Logic of Suicide Terrorism" (book)


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http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html

July 18, 2005 Issue

Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

The Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Last month, Scott McConnell caught up with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win, is beginning to receive wide notice. Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin. In his office is the world?s largest database of information about suicide terrorists, rows and rows of manila folders containing articles and biographical snippets in dozens of languages compiled by Pape and teams of graduate students, a trove of data that has been sorted and analyzed and which underscores the great need for reappraising the Bush administration?s current strategy. Below are excerpts from a conversation with the man who knows more about suicide terrorists than any other American.

Robert Pape: Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. This research is conducted not only in English but also in native-language sources?Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil, and others?so that we can gather information not only from newspapers but also from products from the terrorist community. The terrorists are often quite proud of what they do in their local communities, and they produce albums and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful to understand suicide-terrorist attacks.

This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

...

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign?over 95 percent of all the incidents?has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

...

Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.

...

More from the Interview:

http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html

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While I'm not going to despute his findings, I will say that everyone here will be enthusiastic and pounce on this because its a piece of media that supports their goals. Soon this will be flooded with people jumping for joy so that they can continue to deride the war in Iraq and justify suicide terrorism. Suicide terrorism kills civilians. Guerilla warfare kills occupiers (or percieved occupiers).

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Hm, did i miss something? The reasoning behind bin Laden's attack on the World Trade Center was clear to me when it happened (i must've been 13). I knew that he did it because he had a problem with American troops in his 'home land'. And so did all the other 13-year-olds i argued with about it on the Internet.

Islam only comes up because that's the tool he uses to justify it (and it also happens to be linked with what he considers his home land).

Also, if i had read this a week or two ago, i probably wouldn't have heard of the Tamil Tigers. But i just happened to have read something about them on Wikipedia recently, so i know what he's talking about there. They sound like jerks, alright.

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While I'm not going to despute his findings, I will say that everyone here will be enthusiastic and pounce on this because its a piece of media that supports their goals.? Soon this will be flooded with people jumping for joy so that they can continue to deride the war in Iraq and justify suicide terrorism.? Suicide terrorism kills civilians.? Guerilla warfare kills occupiers (or percieved occupiers).

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If everyone reads your post carefully, I don't think they will have any grounds to pounce on this, because you said yourself "...kill occupiers(or percieved occupiers)" which just fits the bill of the saying: "one mans terrorist is another mans Patriot." To you he is wrong, to the other guy he is right. Which one of you does that make actually wrong or right?

I can't disagree at all that suicide bombers kill civilians, because they do, but they also kill soldiers from time to time. Dont think Guerrillas dont go about killing civilians, because they have. 'Guerrilla' refers to irregular/unconventional military tactics. That being said, suicide bombing is about as irregular as it gets, though suicide fighters/squads are nothing new at all. And since suicide bombings are generally tries to convey some message, it is just trying to do it in the most effective means possible. Blowing up soldiers, is, well, blowing up soldiers, that is what they are 'there for' so to speak. Killing civilians is another matter, they are non-combatants, and you arent supposed to kill them, least for most of history you werent anyways, til they started bombing London in WWI. If you want to demoralize, or send a stronger message, blowing up the innocents, is the best way to go about it. And dont get all high-and-mighty with me about that, because there were places in Europe and Japan in WWII that got the snot bombed out of them for that purpose.

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A rebuttal to this book:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/07/26/pape/

...

As someone who agrees with Pape that stationing American troops in Muslim countries is a really bad idea, even I can see some pretty big holes in this theory. The book's success among vigorous critics of the Bush administration's occupation of Iraq isn't surprising, but its flaws make it a wobbly prop for their arguments.

Pape is keen to advance the idea that "suicide campaigns are primarily nationalistic, not religious, nor are they particularly Islamic." To demonstrate this, he presents many charts and diagrams, produced by collecting and manipulating the demographic information pertaining to the 315 suicide terrorist attacks carried out worldwide between 1980 and 2003. ...

Terry McDermott's "Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It," an impressive work of reporting originating in a series of articles for the Los Angeles Times, offers an interesting corrective to this interpretation. "At least half a dozen men selected for the mission never made it into the United States," McDermott writes of the Sept. 11 conspiracy. Several would-be hijackers couldn't get visas because they were suspected of being economically motivated immigrants, a particular problem for those from Yemen. Yemen, a backward, political mess of a country in which the U.S. has little oil interest and no troops, has a history of contributing many enthusiastic jihadists to the cause. McDermott notes that Osama bin Laden, whose father was born there, has "demonstrated a tendency to use Yemenis in his plots."

...

More http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/07/26/pape/

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