[Peace-discuss] Our Suicide Bombers: Thoughts on Western Jihad

[John W.]

Preaching to the choir, as usual.  But it's interesting.

John



THE WISDOM FUND
http://www.twf.org


August 7, 2009
Tom Dispatch

*Our Suicide Bombers: Thoughts on Western Jihad*
By John Feffer

[John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute
for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. Kathryn Zickuhr
contributed research assistance to this article.]

. . . *In America's first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced
the use of suicide bombers.* Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the
incident were among the U.S. military's first missing in action.

It was September 4, 1804. The United States was at war with the Barbary
pirates along the North African coast. The U.S. Navy was desperate to
penetrate the enemy defenses. Commodore Edward Preble, who headed up the
Third Mediterranean Squadron, chose an unusual stratagem: sending a
booby-trapped U.S.S. Intrepid into the bay at Tripoli, one of the Barbary
states of the Ottoman empire, to blow up as many of the enemy's ships as
possible. U.S. sailors packed 10,000 pounds of gunpowder into the boat along
with 150 shells.

When Lieutenant Richard Sommers, who commanded the vessel, addressed his
crew on the eve of the mission, a midshipman recorded his words:

"'No man need accompany him, who had not come to the resolution to blow
himself up, rather than be captured; and that such was fully his own
determination!' Three cheers was the only reply. The gallant crew rose, as a
single man, with the resolution yielding up their lives, sooner than
surrender to their enemies: while each stepped forth, and begged as a favor,
that he might be permitted to apply the match!"

The crew of the boat then guided the Intrepid into the bay at night. So as
not to be captured and lose so much valuable gunpowder to the enemy, they
chose to blow themselves up with the boat. The explosion didn't do much
damage -- at most, one Tripolitan ship went down -- but the crew was killed
just as surely as the two men who plowed a ship piled high with explosives
into the U.S.S. Cole in the Gulf of Aden nearly 200 years later.

Despite the failure of the mission, Preble received much praise for his
strategies. "A few brave men have been sacrificed, but they could not have
fallen in a better cause," opined a British navy commander. The Pope went
further: "The American commander, with a small force and in a short space of
time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful
nations of Christiandom have done for ages!"

Preble chose his tactic because his American forces were outgunned. It was a
Hail Mary attempt to level the playing field. The bravery of his men and the
reaction of his supporters could be easily transposed to the present day,
when "fanatics" fighting against similar odds beg to sacrifice themselves
for the cause of Islam and garner the praise of at least some of their
religious leaders.

The blowing up of the Intrepid was not the only act of suicidal heroism in
U.S. military history. We routinely celebrate the brave sacrifices of
soldiers who knowingly give up their lives in order to save their unit or
achieve a larger military mission. We commemorate the sacrifice of the
defenders of the Alamo, who could have, after all, slunk away to save
themselves and fight another day. The poetry of the Civil War is rich in the
language of sacrifice. In Phoebe Cary's poem "Ready" from 1861, a black
sailor, "no slavish soul had he," volunteers for certain death to push a
boat to safety.

The heroic sacrifices of the twentieth century are, of course, commemorated
in film. Today, you can buy several videos devoted to the "suicide missions"
of American soldiers.

Our World War II propaganda films -- er, wartime entertainments -- often
featured brave soldiers facing certain death. In Flying Tigers (1942), for
example, pilot Woody Jason anticipates the Japanese kamikaze by several
years by flying a plane into a bridge to prevent a cargo train from reaching
the enemy. In Bataan (1943), Robert Taylor leads a crew of 13 men in what
they know will be the suicidal defense of a critical position against the
Japanese. With remarkable sangfroid, the soldiers keep up the fight as they
are picked off one by one until only Taylor is left. The film ends with him
manning a machine gun against wave upon wave of oncoming Japanese.

Our warrior culture continues to celebrate the heroism of these
larger-than-life figures from World War II by taking real-life stories and
turning them into Hollywood-style entertainments. For his series of "war
stories" on Fox News, for instance, Oliver North narrates an episode on the
Doolittle raid, an all-volunteer mission to bomb Tokyo shortly after Pearl
Harbor. Since the bombers didn't have enough fuel to return to their bases,
the 80 pilots committed to what they expected to be a suicide mission. Most
of them survived, miraculously, but they had been prepared for the ultimate
sacrifice -- and that is how they are billed today. "These are the men who
restored the confidence of a shaken nation and changed the course of the
Second World War," the promotional material for the episode rather grandly
reports. Tokyo had the same hopes for its kamikaze pilots a few years later.

Why Suicide Missions?

America did not, of course, dream up suicide missions. They form a rich vein
in the Western tradition. In the Bible, Samson sacrificed himself in
bringing down the temple on the Philistine leadership, killing more through
his death than he did during his life. The Spartans, at Thermopylae, faced
down the Persians, knowing that the doomed effort would nevertheless delay
the invading army long enough to give the Athenians time to prepare Greek
defenses. In the first century AD in the Roman province of Judea, Jewish
Zealots and Sicarians ("dagger men") launched suicide missions, mostly
against Jewish moderates, to provoke an uprising against Roman rule.

Later, suicide missions played a key role in European history. "Books
written in the post-9/11 period tend to place suicide bombings only in the
context of Eastern history and limit them to the exotic rebels against
modernism," writes Niccolo Caldararo in an essay on suicide bombers. "A
study of the late 19th century and early 20th would provide a spate of
examples of suicide bombers and assassins in the heart of Europe." These
included various European nationalists, Russian anarchists, and other early
practitioners of terrorism.

Given the plethora of suicide missions in the Western tradition, it should
be difficult to argue that the tactic is unique to Islam or to
fundamentalists. Yet some scholars enjoy constructing a restrictive
genealogy for such missions that connects the Assassin sect (which went
after the great sultan Saladin in the Levant in the twelfth century) to
Muslim suicide guerrillas of the Philippines (first against the Spanish and
then, in the early twentieth century, against Americans). They take this
genealogy all the way up to more recent suicide campaigns by Hezbollah,
Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic rebels in the Russian province of Chechnya. The
Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who used suicide bombers in a profligate fashion,
are ordinarily the only major non-Muslim outlier included in this series.

Uniting our suicide attackers and theirs, however, are the reasons behind
the missions. Three salient common factors stand out. First, suicidal
attacks, including suicide bombings, are a "weapon of the weak," designed to
level the playing field. Second, they are usually used against an occupying
force. And third, they are cheap and often brutally effective.

We commonly associate suicide missions with terrorists. But states and their
armies, when outnumbered, will also launch such missions against their
enemies, as Preble did against Tripoli or the Japanese attempted near the
end of World War II. To make up for its technological disadvantages, the
Iranian regime sent waves of young volunteers, some unarmed and some
reportedly as young as nine years old, against the then-U.S.-backed Iraqi
army in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Non-state actors are even more prone to launch suicide missions against
occupying forces. Remove the occupying force, as Robert Pape argues in his
groundbreaking book on suicide bombers, Dying to Win, and the suicide
missions disappear. It is not a stretch, then, to conclude that we, the
occupiers (the United States, Russia, Israel), through our actions, have
played a significant part in fomenting the very suicide missions that we now
find so alien and incomprehensible in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon,
and elsewhere.

The archetypal modern suicide bomber first emerged in Lebanon in the early
1980s, a response to Israel's invasion and occupation of the country. "The
Shiite suicide bomber," writes Mike Davis in his book on the history of the
car bomb, Buda's Wagon, "was largely a Frankenstein monster of [Israeli
Defense Minister] Ariel Sharon's deliberate creation." Not only did U.S. and
Israeli occupation policies create the conditions that gave birth to these
missions, but the United States even trained some of the perpetrators. The
U.S. funded Pakistan's intelligence service to run a veritable insurgency
training school that processed 35,000 foreign Muslims to fight the Soviets
in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson's War, the book and movie that
celebrated U.S. assistance to the mujihadeen, could be subtitled: Suicide
Bombers We Have Known and Funded.

Finally, the technique "works." Suicide bombers kill 12 times more people
per incident than conventional terrorism, national security specialist
Mohammed Hafez points out. The U.S. military has often publicized the
"precision" of its airborne weaponry, of its "smart" bombs and missiles. But
in truth, suicide bombers are the "smartest" bombers because they can zero
in on their target in a way no missile can -- from close up -- and so make
last-minute corrections for accuracy. In addition, by blasting themselves to
smithereens, suicide bombers can't give away any information about their
organization or its methods after the act, thus preserving the security of
the group. You can't argue with success, however bloodstained it might be.
Only when the tactic itself becomes less effective or counterproductive,
does it recede into the background, as seems to be the case today among
armed Palestinian groups.

Individual motives for becoming a suicide bomber or attacker have, when
studied, proved to be surprisingly diverse. We tend to ascribe heroism to
our soldiers when, against the odds, they sacrifice themselves for us, while
we assume a glassy-eyed fanaticism on the part of those who go up against
us. But close studies of suicide bombers suggest that they are generally not
crazy, nor -- another popular explanation -- just acting out of abysmal
poverty or economic desperation (though, as in the case of the sole
surviving Mumbai suicide attacker put on trial in India recently, this seems
to have been the motivation). "Not only do they generally not have economic
problems, but most of the suicide bombers also do not have an emotional
disturbance that prevents them from differentiating between reality and
imagination," writes Anat Berko in her careful analysis of the topic, The
Path to Paradise. Despite suggestions from Iraqi and U.S. officials that
suicide bombers in Iraq have been coerced into participating in their
missions, scholars have yet to record such cases.

Perhaps, however, this reflects a narrow understanding of coercion. After
all, our soldiers are indoctrinated into a culture of heroic sacrifice just
as are the suicide bombers of Hamas. The indoctrination doesn't always work:
scores of U.S. soldiers go AWOL or join the peace movement just as some
suicide bombers give up at the last minute. But the basic-training
techniques of instilling the instinct to kill, the readiness to follow
orders, and a willingness to sacrifice one's life are part of the warrior
ethic everywhere.

Suicide missions are, then, a military technique that armies use when
outmatched and that guerrilla movements use, especially in occupied
countries, to achieve specific objectives. Those who volunteer for such
missions, whether in Iraq today or on board the Intrepid in 1804, are
usually placing a larger goal -- liberty, national self-determination,
ethnic or religious survival -- above their own lives.

But wait: surely I'm not equating soldiers going on suicide missions against
other soldiers with terrorists who blow up civilians in a public place.
Indeed, these are two distinct categories. And yet much has happened in the
history of modern warfare -- in which civilians have increasingly become the
victims of combat -- to blur these distinctions.

Terror and Civilians

The conventional picture of today's suicide bomber is a young man or woman,
usually of Arab extraction, who makes a video proclamation of faith, straps
on a vest of high explosives, and detonates him or herself in a crowded
pizzeria, bus, marketplace, mosque, or church. But we must expand this
picture. The September 11th hijackers targeted high-profile locations,
including a military target, the Pentagon. Hezbollah's suicidal truck driver
destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, killing
241 U.S. soldiers. Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a female Tamil suicide bomber,
assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Suicide bombers, in other words, have targeted civilians, military
installations, non-military sites of great significance, and political
leaders. In suicide attacks, Hezbollah, Tamil Tiger, and Chechen suicide
bombers have generally focused on military and police targets: 88%, 71%, and
61% of the time, respectively. Hamas, on the other hand, has largely
targeted civilians (74% of the time). Sometimes, in response to public
opinion, such movements will shift focus -- and targets. After a 1996 attack
killed 91 civilians and created a serious image problem, the Tamil Tigers
deliberately began chosing military, police, and government targets for
their suicide attacks. "We don't go after kids in Pizza Hut," one Tiger
leader told researcher Mia Bloom, referring to a Hamas attack on a Sbarro
outlet in Jerusalem that killed 15 civilians in 2001.

We have been conditioned into thinking of suicide bombers as targeting
civilians and so putting themselves beyond the established conventions of
war. As it happens, however, the nature of war has changed in our time. In
the twentieth century, armies began to target civilians as a way of
destroying the will of the population, and so bringing down the leadership
of the enemy country. Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, the Nazi
air war against Britain in World War II, Allied fire bombings of German and
Japanese cities, the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S.
carpet bombing in Cambodia and Laos, and the targeted assassinations of the
Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, Russian depredations in Afghanistan
and Chechnya, the tremendous civilian casualties during the Iraq War: all
this has made the idea of conventional armies clashing in an area far from
civilian life a quaint legacy of the past.

Terrorist attacks against civilians, particularly September 11th, prompted
military historian Caleb Carr to back the Bush administration's declaration
of a war against terror. "War can only be answered with war," he wrote in
his best-selling The Lessons of Terror. "And it is incumbent on us to devise
a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than
anything terrorists can contrive." This more imaginative, decisive, and
humane style of war has, in fact, consisted of stepped-up aerial bombing,
beefed-up Special Forces (to, in part, carry out targeted assassinations
globally), and recently, the widespread use of unmanned aerial drones like
the Predator and the Reaper, both in the American arsenal and in 24/7 use
today over the Pakistani tribal borderlands. "Predators can become a modern
army's answer to the suicide bomber," Carr wrote.

Carr's argument is revealing. As the U.S. military and Washington see it,
the ideal use of Predator or Reaper drones, armed as they are with Hellfire
missiles, is to pick off terrorist leaders; in other words, a mirror image
of what that Tamil Tiger suicide bomber (who picked off the Indian prime
minister) did somewhat more cost effectively. According to Carr, such a
strategy with our robot planes is an effective and legitimate military
tactic. In reality, though, such drone attacks regularly result in
significant civilian casualties, usually referred to as "collateral damage."
According to researcher Daniel Byman, the drones kill 10 civilians for every
suspected militant. As Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com writes, "In
Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and
terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means
fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country."

So, the dichotomy between a "just war," or even simply a war of any sort,
and the unjust, brutal targeting of civilians by terrorists has long been
blurring, thanks to the constant civilian casualties that now result from
conventional war-fighting and the narrow military targets of many terrorist
organizations.

Moral Relativism?

We have our suicide bombers -- we call them heroes. We have our culture of
indoctrination -- we call it basic training. We kill civilians -- we call it
collateral damage.

Is this, then, the moral relativism that so outrages conservatives? Of
course not. I've been drawing these comparisons not to excuse the actions of
suicide bombers, but to point out the hypocrisy of our black-and-white
depictions of our noble efforts and their barbarous acts, of our worthy
goals and their despicable ends. We -- the inhabitants of an archipelago of
supposedly enlightened warfare -- have been indoctrinated to view the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima as a legitimate military target and September 11th as a
heinous crime against humanity. We have been trained to see acts like the
attack in Tripoli as American heroism and the U.S.S. Cole attack as rank
barbarism. Explosive vests are a sign of extremism; Predator missiles, of
advanced sensibility.

It would be far better if we opened our eyes when it came to our own world
and looked at what we were actually doing. Yes, "they" sometimes have
dismaying cults of sacrifice and martyrdom, but we do too. And who is to say
that ending occupation is any less noble than making the world free for
democracy? Will Smith, in I Am Legend, was willing to sacrifice himself to
end the occupation of vampires. We should realize that our soldiers in the
countries we now occupy may look no less menacing and unintelligible than
those obviously malevolent, science-fiction creatures. And the presence of
our occupying soldiers sometimes inspires similar, Will Smith-like acts of
desperation and, dare I say it, courage.

The fact is: Were we to end our occupation policies, we would go a long way
toward eliminating "their" suicide bombers. But when and how will we end our
own cult of martyrdom?


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