Like hell you can't. It's happened throughout history, many times. You only need to plant the big lie first.
Posted on 09/27/2006 12:38:22 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Robert A. Pape is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of the forthcoming Cato Institute paper "Suicide Terrorism and Democracy: What We've Learned since 9/11."
The attacks of September 11th, 2001 brought us face to face with the horror of suicide terrorism. In the years since, pundits have painted al Qaeda as a fearless enemy motivated by insatiable religious hatred. Amid prognostications of doom, we lost sight of the truth: that suicide terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, and that beneath the religious rhetoric with which it is perpetrated, it occurs largely in the service of secular aims. Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism.
Al Qaeda is a paradoxical entity: a group with territorial concerns but no territory of its own. It came about in response to the presence of thousands of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula after 1990, and recruited terrorists for suicide missions with the primary aim of forcing them out. Though it speaks of Americans as infidels, al Qaeda is less concerned with converting us to Islam than removing us from Arab and Muslim lands, and it was in this cause that it attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11.
Above all, Al Qaeda seeks to coerce democratic governments into changing their foreign policies. Since 2001, it has achieved a significant degree of success in dividing the West, by concentrating on vulnerable U.S. allies like France, Germany and Turkey, attacking tourists and foreign workers from north Africa to Indonesia.
There is no better way to understand the enemy than to listen to how it recruits new suicide bombers to kill us. In July, Al Qaeda released its most recent recruitment video, encouraging Muslims to carry out new attacks similar to the July 7 bombings in London last year. The video is stunning in its absence of religious declamation.
The first speaker is Shehzad Tanweer, one of the actual 7/7 bombers, who explains that he intended to punish "the non-Muslims of Britain" because "your government has openly supported the genocide of over 15,000 innocent Muslims in Fallujah," the site of a major Western military operation in Iraq in 2004.
The second speaker is Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's second in command, who reiterates that "Shehzad's motivation was the repression which the British are perpetrating in Iraq" and other Muslim countries.
Finally, the main event: Adam Gadahn, a 28-year old American citizen, born of Jewish and Christian parents, who converted to Islam as a teenager and has lived with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 1998. Gadahn is the new voice -- and new weapon -- of Al Qaeda. In his long recruitment appeal, he never mentions 72 virgins or the benefits Islamic martyrs receive in Heaven. Instead, he speaks to an earthly motive: revenge for Western military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I know [Western combat forces] killed and maimed civilians in their strikes because I've seen it with my own eyes ... I've carried the victims in my arms: women, children, toddlers, babies in their mother's wombs," Gadahn says. "When we bomb their cities and civilians like they bomb ours, or destroy their infrastructure and means of transportation like they destroy ours ... they should blame no one but themselves. Because they are the ones who started this dirty war and they are the ones who will end it ... by pulling out of our region and keeping their hands out of our affairs."
To make sense of Al Qaeda's campaign against the United States and its allies, I compiled data on the 71 terrorists who took their own lives carrying out attacks sponsored by Osama bin Laden's network between 1995 and 2004. These men are drawn from two groups: those who feel harmed and humiliated by foreign military occupation, and those who identify with the plight of a kindred ethnic group under foreign occupation.
Although British authorities thwarted last month's airliner attack plot, the arrest and detention of two dozen individuals in the U.K. reveals that Al Qaeda continues to draw strength from disaffected European Muslims, whose anger over Western combat operations in Muslim lands motivates them to take up arms. If it could no longer draw recruits from the Muslim countries where there is an American and Western combat presence, however, the remaining transnational network would pose a far smaller threat.
From 2002 to the end of 2005, Al Qaeda carried out over 17 suicide and other terrorist bombings, killing nearly 700 people – more attacks and victims than in all the years before 9/11 combined. Most Americans would like to believe that Western counter-terrorism efforts have weakened al Qaeda, but by the measure that counts – the ability of the group to kill us – it is stronger today than it was before 9/11.
We must understand that suicide terrorism results more from foreign occupation than Islamic fundamentalism, and conduct the war accordingly.
This article appeared in the Chicago Tribune on September 11, 2006.
CATO: "We must understand that suicide terrorism results more from foreign occupation than Islamic fundamentalism..."
No offense, but do you really not get this distinction?
Do both of us a favor...try peddling it to someone who might actually believe that kind of BS.
Chief, you're out of your league, and you're embarassing yourself. If this is the best you can do, let's just agree to disagree, and you can run along.
As I said, do yourself a favor and try shilling it to someone who might actually believe this BS...in other words find someone in "your league", you know...the minors. I'm sure if you look hard enough you'll find someone else who doesn't believe suicide attacks are ideologically driven. Good luck.
If you're not inclined to click on the links; just read the link titles.
The Marines guarding our embassy in Iran in 1979 were ordered to surrender.
Otherwise, the students who occupied our embassy would have been suicides.
Otherwise, the students who occupied our embassy would have been suicides.
I don't know if you've seen Mark Bowden's documentary or read his book "Guests of the Ayatollah". Bowden wrote "Blackhawk Down", and recently came out with his book on the hostage crisis. Both books are excellent, and the documentary is fascinating.
The embassy was in the process of being stormed when the Marines were ordered to stand down, not the other way around. Had they not stood down during the assault, there would have been a gun battle instead, and some of the assaulters would have died, but that's not exactly the same thing as a suicide bombing attack. It would have been more of a suicidal defense, for the Americans.
My point was just posting prefab sets of links isn't really helpful to the debate. If you have something to say, say it. Anyone with the inclination can google their own research.
Thank you for your feedback Steel Wolf.
Mr. Pape is all wrapped up and backwards in his logic:
1) AQ is upset about territorial encroachments
2) AQ attacks the US
3) The US attacks AQ and its hosts, thereby increasing said territorial encroachments.
4) Therefore, by Pape's arguments, AQ is empowered.
Sorry bud, but it's AQ's strategy that is flawed, not ours. And they know it. Their own actions have led to greater U.S. involvement in Muslim lands, and there is no way around this.
Sure, they fight on, but it's against a line that's creeping steadily against them.
Correct. If it isn't one thing, it will be another. These people with hard-wired resentment will resent virtually anything associated with their programming.
Cato has jumped the shark. Their ideological prejudices has taken control of their common sense forcing them to deny plain, hard facts.
Like hell you can't. It's happened throughout history, many times. You only need to plant the big lie first.
jihad bump
That sounds good, but it's intellectually lazy. Such a theory doesn't doesn't explain why there are more suicide bombings now than prior to 2003, or why the huge increase is only in Iraq.
Incorrect. Correlation does not imply causation. In addition, it is up to the claimant (i.e. YOU) to prove there is a causative link, not others to prove there isn't (see the logical fallacy: shifting the burden of proof).
There are many reasons, independant of territorial concerns, that would explain an increase in suicide bombings in Iraq. First, it might be closer to the bombers, thereby making it easier for them to bomb (it's much harder to slip a terrorist with explosives into the US... plus, the closer to the bad guys, the more of them that will be able/willing to attack). Or the terrorists might see suicide bombing as a more viable tactic (based on local conditions) there than here. Or the increase in attacks might be a sign that the terrorists are afraid their religious, cultural, or political goals are in danger of failing, and they could be a sign of desparation. The Japanese didn't start the war with banzai charges and kamikazes; only after their supplies and escape routes were cut off or when they had run out of trained pilots did they resort to suicide attacks.
There are many plausible explanations for the increase in suicide bomobings in Iraq that have little to do with territorial concerns (especially since many of the terrorists and bombers are being shipped in to Iraq in the first place...). It is your job to prove that their motivation is purely territorial, which so far you have shown little persuasive evidence for...
I don't know anyone who wants open borders or is in favor of illegal immigrants.
Nazism may have been evil, but it was mostly rational. At any rate, WWII analogies, though popular on FR, are bound to fail, because they're comparing two very different forms of warfare. Conventional maneuver battles and long term counterinsurgency efforts are more dissimilar than similar. The only comment I can make is that your point is correct, but irrelevant to the subject of fanatical suicide bombers.
Just as the commies appropriated causes and took advantage of otherws, so to the Islamists do.
A play right out of AQ handbook. Their core philosophy is actually not at all appealing to most Muslims, but they are seen as the only real Muslim resistance to Western aggression and what have you. They gain public support by latching onto public fears, grievances, and interests, when no one else will. It's manipulative, but it works.
I would also note that attacks on Americans increased in 1943 and 2003 for the same reason, we were more accessable!
The accessibility issue, at a glance, has some merit, however, it fails under closer scrutiny:
1. American interests, embassies, tourists, military, and other targets are all over the world. America, both officially and unofficially, is accessible everywhere in the Middle East. Yet suicide bombings were quite rare up until the occupation of Iraq.
2.We were in Afghanistan prior to Iraq, but the suicide bombings have only started there recently. It's a remote place, not in the heart of the Arab world, though, and our attack was clearly a form of retaliation, not aggression. Thus, no larger territorial defensive instinct was triggered. Now that the wars are considered linked, we find it to be somewhat of a double edged sword, as recruiting for both is easier.
3. 9/11, of course, proves that America proper is not more than a plane ticket away. Suicide vests are easy to make, and homemade bombs can be fashioned by anyone with a decent knowledge of chemistry. If you think that the Syrian borders are porous, try the Mexican / Canadian ones.
Suicide bombers can get here, but don't. The reason for that is that suicide attacks can only be sold to most people as defensive tools. You'll never see more than a tiny percentage of people go into lands they don't perceive as their own to conduct a suicide attack.
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