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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (115221)	9/19/2003 1:14:08 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Thanks for the article. There was a good comment on it in Drezner's comments: Pape's article is IMO seminal, but not for the reasons given by Mr. Drezner. I feel it is seminal as one of the first attempts by a political science academic to analyze suicide bombing as a form of strategic attack, and also as a clear example of why academics should not go there. The subject involves too much realism for people who have to exist in an academic environment - it raises obvious issues which they cannot safely address for collegial and career advancement reasons. Suicide attack and defense as consistent patterns are self-defeating because those eventually so enrage the victims that they resort to genocide. There are historic examples and I listed several, with ours being stated in full as the URL for it is no longer available. The past twenty year pattern of suicide bombing terrorism has lasted this long only because of the victims' restraint. IMO every victim has had the capability of inflicting genocide on the perpetrator's faction, including the Sinhalese majority of Sri Lanka vs. the Tamil rebels. Generally this restraint has been imposed externally by the so-called international community, with the notable exceptions of the United States and Israel where domestic moral factors are dominant. Another significant exception concerns Chechnya where the conflict has been used by Russian leaders as a means of securing/maintaining domestic political power to the point where some attacks on Russian civilians seem to have been perpetrated by Russian security forces acting to exacerbate the conflict. I.e., the Russian leadership's interests lie in perpetuating the conflict, not terminating it on favorable terms for the Russian nation, let alone its people. Genocide of the Chechnyans seems to be underway in a piecemeal and possibly unintended fashion - at most a happy by-product. Lee Harris' article cited above summarizes how this restraining international system came into being, and is fraying now. A related issue here is that a suicide bombing tends to require mass support among the perpetrator's ethnic group/faction such that it cannot be easily turned off whether winning or losing. Other commentators have noted that it basically creates a zero-sum situation inhibiting termination of hostilities on terms less than mass slaughter of the loser. The Japanese were very, very, lucky. Academics are not yet ready for a dispassionate discussion of suicide bombing as the subject necessarily entails historic solutions to suicidal attack/defense patterns, i.e., mass slaughter if not genocide. It would be wonderful if academics never get there. But they will. "War is the ultimate moral solvent" - George F. Will. danieldrezner.com