Demosophia

Fisking Robert A. Pape

There's something about ths piece from the New York Times Op/Ed page that just got me riled up, and I had to tackle it. I don't really have a problem with the basic thesis that terrorism, and even suicide terrorism, is a rational strategy.  But I really do not like what Professor Pape does with that, at all.

Blowing Up an Assumption
By ROBERT A. PAPE
Published May 18, 2005
Chicago

MANY Americans are mystified by the recent rise in the number and the audacity of suicide attacks in Iraq.

I'm not.  I'm mystified by the absence of reporting about the success of our strategies in Iraq, and the rather obvious fact that we're winning.  So is there a reason why I need to read the rest of this?  I'll read it though, because I have a hunch there are illusions waiting to be dispelled.  Call me psychic.

The lull in violence after January's successful elections seemed to suggest that the march of democracy was trampling the threat of terrorism. But as electoral politics is taking root, the Iraqi insurgency and suicide terrorism are actually gaining momentum.

If the march of democracy is such a great catalyst for terrorist-supported causes you have to wonder why the terrorists are resisting so strenuously? It's a kind of miracle.

 

In the past two weeks, suicide attackers have killed more than 420 Iraqis working with the United States and its allies. There were 20 such incidents in 2003, nearly 50 in 2004, and they are on pace to set a new record this year.

To make sense of this apparent contradiction, one has to understand the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.

Tell us, oh sage.  There were 6 suicide terrorist attacks in Iraq during 2004 according to the NCTC chronology, although there may have been more that were directed specifically at allied military, and I may have missed one or two in the narratives (though I don't think so). A terrorist attack is, according to the definition, directed at civilian targets, so I don't know how Dr. Pape came up with 50 suicide attacks. But even if there were 50 it shouldn't be all that difficult to either predict or explain the increase. It happens whenever the desperation of a totalitarian cause is sparked by the prospect of imminent defeat. That's what led to the Kamikaze attacks on allied shipping in the Pacific and Project Werewolf in Europe at the end of WWII.  How out-of-the-loop must you be to have overlooked something so obvious?

Totalitarian regimes use suicide aggression during the period when they're either coming to power and when they're losing power at the end. While they're actually in power and relatively unmolested, as were the Ba'ath through much of Saddam's career, they use state terror rather than terror-ism.  And what would be the point of a suicide torturer, other than as comic relief?

Since Muslim terrorists professing religious motives have perpetrated many of the attacks, it might seem obvious that Islamic fundamentalism is the central cause, and thus the wholesale transformation of Muslim societies into secular democracies, even at the barrel of a gun, is the obvious solution. However, the presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading, and it may spur American policies that are likely to worsen the situation.

The correlation is with totalitarianism not fundamentalism.  And nothing Professor Pape presents as evidence runs counter to that.  End of story.  Regarding suicide terrorism, hereinafter referred to as "suicidism," if a pedophile can convince a young heterosexual to have homosexual sex for no good reason is it such a stretch to believe that a ruthless totalitarian would be able to manipulate otherwise benign and impressionable youth to strap on a bomb?  Gimme a break.  In the minds of totalitarians those people are just intelligently guided missiles to be exploited, and the NYT is participating in the deception by sewing the impression that those seeking the license to oppress are equivalent to those resisting oppression.  They deserve to be kicked to the curb for such abuses of logic and ethics.

Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. This includes every episode in which at least one terrorist or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.

So?  Who said religion was the sole operative?  It's a particular KIND of religion that's operative, and that kind may even be atheistic, like Marxism.  All that's required is that it hitch itself to a compelling Ur-myth, and that it be completely unprincipled in pursuit of the fulfillment of that myth.  Which, of course, it is... because the ends justify the means and all that.

The leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more than Hamas (54) or Islamic Jihad (27). Even among Muslims, secular groups like the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al Aksa Martyr Brigades account for more than a third of suicide attacks.

What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.

Actually, what they have in common is a mythology of getting back to the Garden, whether that's a worker's paradise or the Caliphate, or a racially pure "Springtime."  The only reason that seek to compel the withdrawal of the forces of democracy is because they've never actually achieved the first goal in their fanatical march toward Ur.  Had they ever actually made it to first base, they'd be in the process of consolidation after which  they'd begin a strategy to steal second. This is true of Marxist totalitarianism; it's true of Fascist totalitarianism; and it's true of Islamist totalitarianism. Indeed, the pattern is so obvious that one wonders how Professor Pape could possibly miss it, with his eyes open?

Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause.

Three general patterns in the data support these conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks - 301 of the 315 in the period I studied - took place as part of organized political or military campaigns. Second, democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists;

Why would suicide terrorist attacks take place as anything other than an aspect of an organized political or military campaign? What is remarkable about the fact that they do? Is it simply the astonishment of people like Professor Pape that religions can follow a strategy, or is it that he has trouble with the notion that Marxism is a religion? As for the what, where, when and how of the Islamist strategy, Mary Hadek, among others, could clarify that a bit for him. (See a video of Dr. Hadek here.)

If you'd like to really know why democracies are vulnerable, and what we can do about it, see Bill Whittle's just released essays: Sanctuary 1 and Sanctuary 2. And we're not as vulnerable as we look.

America, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades.

Spain took a pretty big hit recently, in the long ball tradition.  Same with Russia.  Spain topped the list for casualties in 2004, and Russia was second.  Small number of attacks, but highly lethal.  India was third, although the average quality and lethality of individual attacks in Kashmir was low.  (See my earlier post on this topic here or here.) There weren't really very many suicide terrorist attacks last year.  I count less than 30 worldwide, or fewer than 5% of the total number of attacks in the NCTC database (651).  They were, however, highly lethal, accounting for almost 1,000 of about 1800 civilian deaths.  All but one occurred in Iraq, Russia or Israel, the isolated exception being in Spain (its only terrorist attack that killed or injured anyone).

Most of the attacks in India were in Kashmir, rather than in the Tamil Tiger stronghold of southern India or Sri Lanka.  In lethality Iraq was the most deadly, Russia second, India third and Spain fourth.  Together, on just about any measure--lethality, casualties, quality--those four countries accounted for about 85% of the terrorist activity in 2004.  France had ten casualties and no deaths, America zero,  Turkey  22 with only 2 deaths. So what's the pattern?  Jihadism, that's the pattern.  Where they can register an attack, they do, even if it's only a home invasion. Salafist extremism is what's driving things, and that's only because it's the most recent form of totalitarianism. After we defeat them, it'll be something else... until liberalism matures and gets its head out of you-know-where.

Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign - 18 organizations in all - are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination.

Well that's a quaint way to put it. What they're seeking is a base of operations from which to launch more attacks free from the effects of police surveillance and suppression.  Has this fellow never heard of the "Method of Muhammed?"  The first objective is to establish an Islamist state.  They don't plan to stop with that, though. Yes that's strategic. That's part of why we're at war, as opposed to a long drawn-out police manhunt for a few bad actors.

Before Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide terrorist campaign against Israel;

See the pattern here? He's attempting to say that this is all the fault of the "Old Jews" in Israel and the "New Jews" in the US, and he's using this brain-addled theory about suicide terrorism to do it. But the fact is that the attacks in Israel and Palestine look like a bell curve, and they're now tapering off again.  Total killed last year in Israel and Palestine combined was 88, after all that provocation from the New Jews invading Babylon, too.  That number was exceeded in Spain by almost 220% in one day.  So, what was their objective?  What's the percentage of Muslims in Spain seeking a Spanish homeland, do you think?  And lest you believe Iraq was the objective, well in a sense sure, but virtually none of the assailants in the Madrid transit bombing were Iraqi. So what do they want Iraq for, do you think? A place to hold birthday parties?

indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after this event. Before the Sri Lankan military began moving into the Tamil homelands of the island in 1987, the Tamil Tigers did not use suicide attacks. Before the huge increase in Jewish settlers on the West Bank in the 1980's, Palestinian groups did not use suicide terrorism.

And, true to form, there had never been a documented suicide attack in Iraq until after the American invasion in 2003.

The Palestinians hadn't used terrorist attacks before 1980 because they hadn't been reinvented yet, in their modern form. It just didn't occur to them. Qutb had laid the groundwork and there were occasional instances, but until Arafat had his brainstorm they were infrequent. The case that suicidism was invented because of an outrage against Palestinian nationalism is just eyewash. Why wasn't it used in Vietnam, which had a fairly intense nationalist outrage to nurse? Yes, suicidism is a rational strategy. So what else is new? And the reason it wasn't used in Iraq prior to the US invasion is no great mystery. That's because it was a freakin' TERROR STATE!  What need did it have for terror-ism? Is this fellow on drugs?

Much is made of the fact that we aren't sure who the Iraqi suicide attackers are. This is not unusual in the early years of a suicide terrorist campaign. Hezbollah published most of the biographies and last testaments of its "martyrs" only after it abandoned the suicide-attack strategy in 1986, a pattern adopted by the Tamil Tigers as well.

It might be a good idea to attempt to suppress these "biographies," don't you think?  Since they're essentially written by the folks trying to recruit more. But with the internet that would be impossible, and anyway the fact is that there were only 6 suicide terrorist attacks in Iraq last year, so recruitment must've been down for some reason.  I wonder why?  (In truth it wasn't suicide-willing recruits that were down, but opportunities to deploy them. And that's because we were using, er... counter-measures.)

At the moment, our best information indicates that the attackers in Iraq are Sunni Iraqis and foreign fighters, principally from Saudi Arabia. If so, this would mean that the two main sources of suicide terrorists in Iraq are from the Arab countries deemed most vulnerable to transformation by the presence of American combat troops. This is fully consistent with what we now know about the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.

It's a stretch to read into this some special freedom-fighting ethic, I think. It's also trivially obvious that these folks would defend their freedom of movement and their prerogatives, including access to a victim population to be oppressed or incited to jihad, depending on the need. Finding people to volunteer for suicide attacks is easy.  What they'd like is an Ummah-wide Fallujah, complete with scaled-up baby Auschwitz slaughterhouses so that they could institutionalize terror on a massive scale, and use terror-ism only on "the far enemy." (That's us, and Europe, of course.)

Some have wondered if the rise of suicide terrorism in Iraq is really such a bad thing for American security. Is it not better to have these killers far away in Iraq rather than here in the United States? Alas, history shows otherwise. The presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula after 1990 enabled Al Qaeda to recruit suicide terrorists, who in turn attacked Americans in the region (the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000). The presence of nearly 150,000 American combat troops in Iraq since 2003 can only give suicide terrorism a boost, and the longer this suicide terrorist campaign continues the greater the risk of new attacks in the United States.

6 suicide attacks in Iraq last year, but only three accounted for most of the deaths (310).  Again, from a statistical standpoint I really don't know how you can say very much about suicide attack recruitment.  The most prudent assessment would be that they can probably recruit enough to meet their needs no matter what we do, and Bin Laden has said that there was a far greater supply of volunteers than missions.  What does that tell you?  Surely not that controlling the spigot of suicide attackers is the best strategic option for winning the war?  Rather, the best strategic option is to control the RECRUITERS and control or moderate THEIR LETHALITY.

Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism.

Who cares what it's a response to, actually.  It could be a response to indigestion, for all it matters.

Spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea so long as foreign combat troops remain on the Arabian Peninsula.

There is no panacea.  It's a strategy, and it's working.  How much more does it have to be, to appeal to what small increment of logic and ethics is left to the Left?

If not for the world's interest in Persian Gulf oil, the obvious solution might well be simply to abandon the region altogether.

Well, lucky for the Iraqis we want their oil, huh?

Isolationism, however, is not possible; America needs a new strategy that pursues our vital interest in oil but does not stimulate the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.

Again, it's unimportant.  Suicidists are a dime a dozen. How to deploy them is the problem, for the totalitarians.  That's the part of the equation where we come in.  We screw up their deployment regime, simple as that. And we take out there leaders, the people driving the recruitment.  It seems to me that if Professor Pape is at all awake and aware he'd be able to see that the suicidists aren't directing themselves, but they're being recruited and directed by someone.  That ought to tell him that controlling the handlers and recruiters is the problem, not the willingness of impressionable people to sacrifice themselves.  What's wrong with the Professor Papes of the world?  Why isn't this obvious?

BEYOND recognizing the limits of military action and stepping up domestic security efforts, Americans would do well to recall the virtues of our traditional policy of "offshore balancing" in the Persian Gulf. During the 1970's and 1980's, the United States managed its interests there without stationing any combat soldiers on the ground, but keeping our forces close enough - either on ships or in bases near the region - to deploy in huge numbers if an emergency. This worked splendidly to defeat Iraq's aggression against Kuwait in 1990.

Offshore balancing didn't do diddly to forestall the attack on the WTC.  But I have no problem withdrawing to a redoubt somewhere WHEN THE MISSION IS COMPLETELY FULFILLED. That part's obvious.  Out of sight, out of mind.  But ready to pounce on short notice should the need arise.

THE Bush administration rightly intends to start turning over the responsibility for Iraq's security to the new government and systematically withdrawing American troops. But large numbers of these soldiers should not simply be sent to Iraq's neighbors, where they will continue to enrage many in the Arab world. Keeping the peace from a discreet distance seems a better way to secure our interests in the world's key oil-producing region without provoking more terrorism.

And where they'll inspire more sincere reformers to continue pouring acid into the brains of the Zarqawis of the region: the vanguard of liberalism/democracy against their vanguard of totalitarian Islamism. Not complicated.  (Here I use the term "liberalism" in the classic, rather than the partisan sense.)

There's such minimal value in this "analysis" that I fail to perceive why it was even published, unless it's just part of a power struggle in the West.  Essentially it makes little, if any, sense.  It certainly contributes nothing to winning the struggle against a rather formidable enemy, unless we have some serious problem coming to grips with the notion that terrorism isn't a scream in the dark, but a war strategy. I don't have a problem with that, do you? Of course it is. But it doesn't follow that terrorism is a strategy of liberation from an oppressor. In fact, history says precisely the opposite. It's a strategy designed to obtain the license to oppress. Sort of rolls off your tongue, doesn't it?

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia, Anticipatory Retaliation and The Jawa Report)

Posted by Demosophist at May 20, 2005 03:10 AM | TrackBack