The West has its own suicide bombers
By John Feffer
The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish
face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am
Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor. And yet,
surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith
clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws himself at the enemy in a final
burst of heroic sacrifice.
Wait a second: surely that wasn't a suicide bombing? Will Smith wasn't reciting suras
from the Koran. He wasn't sporting one of those rising-sun headbands that the
Japanese kamikaze
wore for their suicide missions. He wasn't playing a religious fanatic or a
political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a
suicide bomber? After all, he's one of us, isn't he?
As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. "We" are the powerful,
developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual
liberties and individual lives. "We" form a moral archipelago that encompasses
the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan and occasionally Russia.
Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and
movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland,
democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men weren't
expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn't make film records of their
last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much
praise and recognition as "their" martyrs.
The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these
studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes
against their own compatriots but mainly against us. According to the popular
view, Shi'ite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally
different attitude toward life and death.
If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers - and our own
unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns - how
different can these attitudes really be?
Western jihad
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 US 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 US 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 USS 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. US 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 USS 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 US 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 20th 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 - so-called "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 12th 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-US-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
Shi'ite 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 US and Israeli occupation policies create the conditions that gave
birth to these missions, but the United States even trained some of the
perpetrators. The US 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 US 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 US 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, or
- another popular explanation - just acting out of abysmal poverty or economic
desperation. (Although, 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 US 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
US soldiers go absent without leave 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. We must expand this picture. The September
11 hijackers targeted high-profile locations, including a military target, the
Pentagon. Hezbollah's suicidal truck driver destroyed the US Marine barracks in
Beirut on October 23, 1983, killing 241 US 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 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 choosing 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 20th
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, US 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 11, prompted
military historian Caleb Carr to back the George W 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 US 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 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 11 as a heinous crime
against humanity. We have been trained to see acts like the attack in Tripoli
as American heroism and the USS 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?
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the
Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. His past
essays, including those for Tomdispatch.com, can be read at his website.
Kathryn Zickuhr contributed research assistance to this article.
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