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

To: epicure who wrote (115543)	9/23/2003 12:54:33 PM
From: FaultLine	Respond to of 281500

A good article, imo. Dying to kill: The strategic logic of suicide bombers Yes indeed. Very useful. Thanks --fl

To: epicure who wrote (115543)	9/23/2003 2:00:42 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Pape puts his conclusion in his premise: Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland He seems to regard it as self-evident that if a terrorist campaign has gaining land as its goal, then it has a "secular" goal. My response is, Say What? different people want land for all sorts of different reasons. Some of the reasons are simply political, some are societal, some are historical, some are religious, some are all these causes mixed together. The Serbs wanted Kosovo for historical reasons. The Crusaders wanted Jerusalem for religious reasons. The Arabs want Israel destroyed for religous and societal reasons: for land that was once Muslim and Arab to revert to being non-Muslim and non-Arab is obviously contrary to the will of Allah. Also, Israel makes the Arabs look very bad by comparison, and they feel shame. So the rise in Islamic fundamentalism includes a corresponding rise in the wish to get rid of Israel. Moreover, Pape does not address the nature of Islamism, which is something quite different from a pure religious revival. It is much closer to a totalitarian political movement wrapped round in the green flag of Islam. Hamas doesn't just want to remove Israel; it wants to establish its own rule in an Islamic State of Palestine. Is this a religious or a political goal? Yes.

To: epicure who wrote (115543)	9/23/2003 8:08:20 PM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Re: Dying to Kill Nadine's crtiicism of Pape's article is well taken. When I posted his original work here - danieldrezner.com - I expected there might be a fair bit of criticism. She is correct in noting his lack of treatment of the ideological basis behind those who direct much suicide terrorism. For instance, the Sri Lankan government is highly unlikely in the end to give way on fundamental matters to the LTTE, a Marxist-Leninist movement: Whatever the faults of the Sri Lankan majority government in its original treatment of the Tamil minority, it does have democratic customs and institutions which are antithetical to the aims of Marxist-Leninism generally, and specifically to those of the LTTE. Similarly with the extremist, anti-modernist Islamist movements which sponsor suicide terrorism. Like the LTTE, they also piggy back on nationalist movements and even the modernist aspirations of the populations they exploit. Pape writes in the abstract of his article this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions but never mentions the corollary: that these liberal democracies (modernist countries) must also give way to an extremely hostile ideology - something far more important tnan territorial concessions. The aim of the administrators of suicide terrorism is not territory in itself but space for their ideological flowering. The outcome for the Islamists is something like Iran, and for the LTTE, something like Cuba. It strikes me that in both cases the outcomes envisioned by these terrorist ideologues are undesirable in the 21st century. Pape slides obliquely past this important aspect of suicide terrorism although he does come near it towards the end of his paper when he discusses the gains the terrorizing movements have made. The democracies don't have much give: While suicide terrorism has achieved modest or very limited goals, it has so far failed to compel target democracies to abandon goals central to national wealth or security. When the United States withdrew from Lebanon in 1984, it had no important se-curity, economic, or even ideological interests at stake. Lebanon was largely a humanitarian mission and not viewed as central to the national welfare of the United States. Israel withdrew from most of Lebanon in June 1985 but remained in a security buffer on the edge of southern Lebanon for more than a decade afterward, despite the fact that 17 of 22 suicide attacks occurred in 1985 and 1986. Israel's withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995 occurred at the same time that settlements increased and did little to hinder the IDF's return, and so these concessions were more modest than they may appear. Sri Lanka has suffered more casualties from suicide attack than Israel but has not acceded to demands that it surrender part of its national territory. Thus, the logic of punishment and the record of suicide terrorism suggests that, unless suicide terrorists acquire far moredestructive technolo-gies, suicide attacks for more ambitious goals are likely to fail and will continue to provoke more aggressive military responses.