Would Total American Withdrawal End Suicide Terrorism in Iraq?

One of my many disappointments with the media is that in the wake of the attacks in England and Mike Chertoff’s gut-check, we have seen no Op-Eds by Robert A. Pape, the realist at the University of Chicago who knows more about suicide terrorism than anyone.

Pape’s 2005 book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism collected extensive data on suicide terrorism and concluded that suicide terrorists are cold-blooded nationalists. "We like our villains to be wild-eyed monsters." They’re not; overwhelmingly, Pape showed, suicide bombers were motivated by rage over a foreign occupation, when there was a religious difference between occupier and occupied. Absolutely, religion is a factor, but Pape showed that suicide terrorism and Islamic radicalism were two different categories; that the most fervently-fundamentalist Islamic societies had produced few suicide terrorists, while states occupied or heavily-aided by the U.S. had produced the most. (His sample included Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 bomber and son of a prosperous Egyptian lawyer, whom Pape described as "principled and meticulous, conscientious and rational."  And motivated to kill himself and thousands of Americans too, by the American occupation of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.)

Pape’s largest database, of over 100 suicide terrorists, weren’t
Islamic fundamentalists at all, but Tamil Hindus, fighting the Buddhist
majority in Sri Lanka.

Since Pape’s book came out, I bet the Tamils have been outstripped
by Iraqis. And now there is the collection of doctors in England. I am
pretty sure what Pape would say about their motivation: American
occupation, inflamed by religious differences. And I wonder whether
Pape would not say that all the suicide terrorism in Iraq now is aimed
at the U.S., rather than by one Muslim sect against another. Suicide
terrorists, he argues, are using the only weapons they have against a
heavily armed occupier.

That raises the question: If the occupier left completely, would the
most horrifying aspect of the Iraqi civil war–the suicide terrorists
who kill and maim innocents–disappear, replaced by a more conventional
battle, of militia against militia? I believe that Pape would say
that so long as the U.S. is propping up a government, suicide terrorism will continue. (Which is not to say that we shouldn’t battle Al-Qaeda…)

Rereading Pape reminds me of a conversation I had this spring at
Columbia with a freshman lately arrived from Dubai, named Rahel Aima.
Rahel is from an Indian background, her parents work on the Arabian
peninsula, she grew up there. And she says that Americans have little
idea about the everyday rage toward Americans throughout the Arab
world. Why do they hate us? Because we’ve been trying to control them.
Nobody likes that.

P.S. My friend Dan tells me that Juan Cole wrote about Pape on Salon…

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