I Heard a
Fantastic Interview Regarding Suicide Bombings
I heard a fantastic interview on Melbourne ABC radio
today on the Lindy Burns show. The
interview was with the author of “Dying to Win – The Strategic Logic of Suicide
Terrorism”, written by University of Chicago
political scientist Robert Pape.
Unfortunately the interview doesn’t appear to be available for download,
but I have found another interview that is available for download. See at the end of this blog for more
information regarding links to information about this book.
I have to say that his findings have reinforced my belief that
these suicide bombings are generally the result of an oppressed society that
hasn’t got the means to remove an occupying force. I know I may be opening myself up for
ridicule for making this statement, but if you look at the facts then the
evidence is there supporting my opinion.
Please do not think that I support these acts of terrorism, but
I fully understand the perpetrators thinking and the desperation behind these
attacks. I hope in the future to write a
blog to try and show my thinking.
If you are seriously interested in understanding the purpose behind
suicide bombings, then I would definitely recommend you listen to the audio
interview listed at the bottom of this blog and then if you would like to
investigate further read Robert Pape’s book.
Below is a summary of Robert Pape’s book:
Suicide terrorism is rising around the
world, but there is great confusion as to why. In this paradigm-shifting analysis,
University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has collected groundbreaking
evidence to explain the strategic, social, and individual factors responsible
for this growing threat.
One of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject, Professor Pape has
created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in
the world from 1980 until today. With striking clarity and precision, Professor
Pape uses this unprecedented research to debunk widely held misconceptions
about the nature of suicide terrorism and provide a new lens that makes sense
of the threat we face.
FACT: Suicide terrorism is not primarily a product of Islamic fundamentalism.
FACT: The world’s leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are the Tamil
Tigers in Sri Lanka–a secular, Marxist-Leninist group drawn from Hindu families.
FACT: Ninety-five percent of suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of
coherent campaigns organized by large militant organizations with significant
public support.
FACT: Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is
secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces
from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
FACT: Al-Qaeda fits the above pattern. Although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, one major
objective of al-Qaeda is the expulsion of U.S.
troops from the Persian Gulf region, and as a result there have been repeated attacks by
terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden against American troops in Saudi Arabia and the region as a whole.
FACT: Despite their rhetoric, democracies–including the United States–have
routinely made concessions to suicide terrorists. Suicide terrorism is on the
rise because terrorists have learned that it’s effective.
In this wide-ranging analysis, Professor Pape offers the essential tools to
forecast when some groups are likely to resort to suicide terrorism and when
they are not. He also provides the first comprehensive demographic profile of
modern suicide terrorist attackers. With data from more than 460 such
attackers–including the names of 333–we now know that these individuals are not
mainly poor, desperate criminals or uneducated religious fanatics but are often
well-educated, middle-class political activists.
More than simply advancing new theory and facts, these pages also answer key
questions about the war on terror:
• Are we safer now than we were before September 11?
• Was the invasion of Iraq a good counterterrorist move?
• Is al-Qaeda stronger now than it was before September 11?
Professor Pape answers these questions with analysis grounded in fact, not
politics, and recommends concrete ways for today’s states to fight and prevent
terrorist attacks. Military options may disrupt terrorist operations in the
short term, but a lasting solution to suicide terrorism will require a
comprehensive, long-term approach–one that abandons visions of empire and
relies on a combined strategy of vigorous homeland security, nation building in
troubled states, and greater energy independence.
For both policy makers and the general public, Dying to Win transcends
speculation with systematic scholarship, making it one of the most important
political studies of recent time.
Below is a transcript taken from an interview Robert Pape gave
to the “The American Conservative”.
July 18, 2005 Issue
The American Conservative
The Logic of Suicide Terrorism
It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism
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.
The American Conservative: Your new
book, Dying to Win, has a subtitle: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
Can you just tell us generally on what the book is based, what kind of research
went into it, and what your findings were?
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.
This is a Marxist group, a completely secular
group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country.
They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv
Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the
Tamil Tigers.
TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not
necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?
RP: 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.
TAC: That would seem to run contrary to
a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by
people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over
there, so we don’t have to fight them here.
RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a
response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy
military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only
likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.
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.
TAC: If we were to back up a little bit
before the invasion of Iraq to what happened before 9/11, what was the nature of the agitprop
that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were putting out to attract people?
RP: Osama bin Laden’s speeches and
sermons run 40 and 50 pages long. They begin by calling tremendous attention to
the presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.
In 1996, he went on to say that there was a
grand plan by the United States—that the Americans were going to use combat
forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to
Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to
Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of
tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.
TAC: The fact that we had troops
stationed on the Arabian Peninsula was not a very live issue in American debate at all. How many
Saudis and other people in the Gulf were conscious of it?
RP: We would like to think that if we
could keep a low profile with our troops that it would be okay to station them
in foreign countries. The truth is, we did keep a fairly low profile. We did
try to keep them away from Saudi society in general, but the key issue with
American troops is their actual combat power. Tens of thousands of American
combat troops, married with air power, is a tremendously powerful tool.
Now, of course, today we have 150,000 troops on
the Arabian Peninsula, and we are more in control of the Arabian Peninsula than ever
before.
TAC: If you were to break down causal
factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and
how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?
RP: The evidence shows that the presence
of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.
If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal
factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries
in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population
of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most
active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there
has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and
we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from
Iran.
Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely
Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was
so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in
the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.
I have the first complete set of data on every
al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some
of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are
from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.
Another point in this regard is Iraq
itself. Before our invasion, Iraq
never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion,
suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in
2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq,
suicide terrorism has doubled.
TAC: So your assessment is that there
are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there
were in March 2003?
RP: I have collected demographic data
from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed
the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most
are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime
members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first
experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.
There is no evidence there were any
suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq
before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been
produced by the invasion.
TAC: Do we know who is committing
suicide terrorism in Iraq? Are they primarily Iraqis or walk-ins from other countries in the
region?
RP: Our best information at the moment
is that the Iraqi suicide terrorists are coming from two groups—Iraqi Sunnis
and Saudis—the two populations most vulnerable to transformation by the
presence of large American combat troops on the Arabian Peninsula. This is
perfectly consistent with the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.
TAC: Does al-Qaeda have the capacity to
launch attacks on the United
States, or are they
too tied down in Iraq? Or have they made a strategic decision not to attack the United States, and if so, why?
RP: Al-Qaeda appears to have
made a deliberate decision not to attack the United States in the short term. We know this not only from the pattern of their
attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda planning document found by
Norwegian intelligence. The document says that al-Qaeda should not try to
attack the continent of the United States in the short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America’s
allies in order to try to split the coalition.
What the document then goes on to do is analyze
whether they should hit Britain, Poland, or Spain. It concludes that they should hit Spain
just before the March 2004 elections because, and I am quoting almost verbatim:
Spain could not withstand two, maximum three, blows before withdrawing
from the coalition, and then others would fall like dominoes.
That is exactly what happened. Six months after
the document was produced, al-Qaeda attacked Spain in Madrid. That
caused Spain to withdraw from the coalition. Others have followed. So al-Qaeda
certainly has demonstrated the capacity to attack and in fact they have done
over 15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than all the years before
9/11 combined. Al-Qaeda is not weaker now. Al-Qaeda is stronger.
TAC: What would constitute a victory in
the War on Terror or at least an improvement in the American situation?
RP: For us, victory means not
sacrificing any of our vital interests while also not having Americans
vulnerable to suicide-terrorist attacks. In the case of the Persian Gulf, that means we
should pursue a strategy that secures our interest in oil but does not
encourage the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, the United States secured its interest in oil without stationing a single combat
soldier on the Arabian Peninsula. Instead, we formed an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which we can now do again. We relied on numerous aircraft carriers
off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and naval air power now is more effective not less. We also built
numerous military bases so that we could move large numbers of ground forces to
the region quickly if a crisis emerged.
That strategy, called “offshore balancing,”
worked splendidly against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy
to secure our interest in oil while preventing the rise of more suicide
terrorists.
TAC: Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda
leaders also talked about the “Crusaders-Zionist alliance,” and I wonder if
that, even if we weren’t in Iraq,
would not foster suicide terrorism. Even if the policy had helped bring about a
Palestinian state, I don’t think that would appease the more hardcore opponents
of Israel.
RP: I not only study the patterns of
where suicide terrorism has occurred but also where it hasn’t occurred. Not
every foreign occupation has produced suicide terrorism. Why do some and not
others? Here is where religion matters, but not quite in the way most people
think. In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a
suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the
occupier and the occupied community. That is true not only in places such as Lebanon
and in Iraq today but also in Sri Lanka,
where it is the Sinhala Buddhists who are having a dispute with the Hindu
Tamils.
When there is a religious difference between
the occupier and the occupied, that enables terrorist leaders to demonize the
occupier in especially vicious ways. Now, that still requires the occupier to
be there. Absent the presence of foreign troops, Osama bin Laden could make his
arguments but there wouldn’t be much reality behind them. The reason that it is
so difficult for us to dispute those arguments is because we really do have
tens of thousands of combat soldiers sitting on the Arabian Peninsula.
TAC: Has the next generation of
anti-American suicide terrorists already been created? Is it too late to wind
this down, even assuming your analysis is correct and we could de-occupy Iraq?
RP: Many people worry that once a large
number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down.
The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the
occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they
often stop—and often on a dime.
In Lebanon,
for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and
after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France
withdrew its forces, and then Israel
withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased.
They didn’t completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism.
Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide
terrorists did not follow Israel to
Tel Aviv.
This is also the pattern of the second Intifada
with the Palestinians. As Israel is
at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in
addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious
suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of
military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to
recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn’t mean that the existing suicide
terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden
would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a
tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue
is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him.
That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide
terrorism.
TAC: There have been many kinds of
non-Islamic suicide terrorists, but have there been Christian suicide
terrorists?
RP: Not from Christian groups per se,
but in Lebanon in the 1980s, of those suicide attackers, only eight were Islamic
fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were Communists and Socialists. Three were Christians.
TAC: Has the IRA used suicide terrorism?
RP: The IRA did not. There were IRA
members willing to commit suicide—the famous hunger strike was in 1981. What is
missing in the IRA case is not the willingness to commit suicide, to kill
themselves, but the lack of a suicide-terrorist attack where they try to kill
others.
If you look at the pattern of violence in the
IRA, almost all of the killing is front-loaded to the 1970s and then trails off
rather dramatically as you get through the mid-1980s through the 1990s. There
is a good reason for that, which is that the British government, starting in
the mid-1980s, began to make numerous concessions to the IRA on the basis of
its ordinary violence. In fact, there were secret negotiations in the 1980s,
which then led to public negotiations, which then led to the Good Friday
Accords. If you look at the pattern of the IRA, this is a case where they
actually got virtually everything that they wanted through ordinary violence.
The purpose of a suicide-terrorist attack is
not to die. It is the kill, to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the
target society in order to compel that target society to put pressure on its
government to change policy. If the government is already changing policy, then
the whole point of suicide terrorism, at least the way it has been used for the
last 25 years, doesn’t come up.
TAC: Are you aware of any different
strategic decision made by al-Qaeda to change from attacking American troops or
ships stationed at or near the Gulf to attacking American civilians in the United States?
RP: I wish I could say yes because that
would then make the people reading this a lot more comfortable.
The fact is not only in the case of al-Qaeda,
but in suicide-terrorist campaigns in general, we don’t see much evidence that
suicide-terrorist groups adhere to a norm of attacking military targets in some
circumstances and civilians in others.
In fact, we often see that suicide-terrorist
groups routinely attack both civilian and military targets, and often the
military targets are off-duty policemen who are unsuspecting. They are not
really prepared for battle.
The reasons for the target selection of suicide
terrorists appear to be much more based on operational rather than normative
criteria. They appear to be looking for the targets where they can maximize the
number of casualties.
In the case of the West Bank, for instance, there
is a pattern where Hamas and Islamic Jihad use ordinary guerrilla attacks, not
suicide attacks, mainly to attack settlers. They use suicide attacks to
penetrate into Israel proper. Over 75 percent of all the suicide attacks in the second
Intifada were against Israel proper and only 25 percent on the West Bank itself.
TAC: What do you think the chances are
of a weapon of mass destruction being used in an American city?
RP: I think it depends not exclusively,
but heavily, on how long our combat forces remain in the Persian Gulf. The central
motive for anti-American terrorism, suicide terrorism, and catastrophic
terrorism is response to foreign occupation, the presence of our troops. The
longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian
Peninsula, the greater the risk of the
next 9/11, whether that is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack, or a biological
attack. 
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html
More information can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_to_Win:_The_Strategic_Logic_of_Suicide_Terrorism
An excellent audio interview can be
downloaded from the American interview show “Scott Horton Show” the interview
is dated July 16th 2005 :
http://www.scotthortonshow.com/index.php?tag=robert-pape
If you have listened to the interview and read the transcipt above and/or Robert's book I would love to hear your opinion via a comment.
Thanks,
ChezzaJT
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