Think Again: The First Comprehensive Database of Suicide Bombing

This weekend, the media is pumping out 9/11 anniversary productions. There is some somber coverage of that sad day, and well-deserved praise for its incredible heroes, and there are also kitschy broad strokes of America as some sort of helpless victim.

Fortunately for us and our children, a book bourne of painstakingly accumulated data - not opinion - provides reliable insight into why events like 9/11 happen. It surely is different from a typical romp through U.S. cable news! The book is: Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape. In a Cato Institute panel discussion, Flynt Leverett, former National Security Council aide for the Bush Administration said that every policy maker, diplomatic head and military leader should memorize this book.

The Starkly Under-reported Findings. Well, waddya know: much of what Americans are told over and over in the mainstream media about threats of 9/11-type terrorism is just bunk. It turns out that suicide bombing has always been driven by the control of land, and not by religious goals. For that matter, the majority of suicide bombings have been commited by non-Muslims. Well, now -- that's not what we get on the cable news networks. While the people who perpetrated the events of 9/11 are simply murderers, and there is no justification for their heinous crimes, we do ourselves no good whatsoever by ignoring the real drivers of such killers, painting our own picture of their motivations in order to suit our preferred methods of prevention.

Religion's role in suicide bombing, while quite different from the "fundamentalist Islamic jihad against the infidels" we constantly hear about, is in fact, quite enlightening to understand. There is an extremely high correlation between an occupied native population erupting in suicide bombings, and the religions of the occupier and the natives being different - whichever religions they may be. The clear conclusion is that suicide bombing has much more to do with the perceived intractability of an occupier than the characteristics of particular religions.

Professor Pape, a noted authority on national security who has, among his teaching roles, taught air strategy for the U.S. Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies, has assembled the first comprehensive database of suicide bombing. The U.S. Government itself welcomed his research, which enumerates suicide bombings beginning in 1980, and included the use of data mining overseas by native-language researchers.

A Link to Nuclear Non-proliferation. It's instructive to realize how consistent this insight is with the principals of nuclear non-proliferation. Not many realize that Non-proliferation protocols advise strongly against policies such as that of "regime change". Indeed, America has become increasingly eager to exhibit this audacious strain of intractability over the past decade. Besides the 1998 Clinton/Congressional policy of "Iraq regime change", we've moved on to Bush's "Axis of Evil" rhetoric in the 2002 State of the Union along with the attendant calls for regime change in Iran and N. Korea, and of course, the Bush Administration's refusal to go mano-a-mano in negotiating with either of those two countries, opting for oblique multi-lateral talks.

Here in the U.S., we all too often toss around the legitimacy of sovereign governments in our rhetoric. While we hope at least some folks in seats of power understand the ramifications of doing so at one level or another, the American people generally do not. Some people are comfortable blissfully "trusting those in power", but I see grave danger in an electorate operating without facts and proven guidelines.

Another Link to Policies of Yesteryear. Mr. Pape shows how a policy he calls "off-shore containment" would be consistent with these findings. U.S. military personnel would be off-shore on ships, while any bases we have on foreign soil are ready but unmanned. We've heard echos of this before when recruiting tapes for suicide bombers first became public. Their central images are of U.S. tanks and planes on foreign soil.

It happens that going back into the 1960's, it was indeed a principle of American foreign policy, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula, to keep our troops off-shore. Pape lends us his expertise in the use of air power by mentioning that the potency such an off-shore force would have is dramatically stronger than it would have been in the past.

Just the Facts, Ma'am. Here are some facts listed on the Powells.com page for Pape's Dying to Win:

• FACT: Suicide terrorism is not primarily a product of Islamic fundamentalism
• FACT: The world's leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka-a secular, Marxist-Leninist group drawn from Hindu families.
• FACT: Ninety-five percent of suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of coherent campaigns organized by large militant organizations with significant public support.
• FACT: Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
• FACT: Al-Qaeda fits the above pattern. Although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, one major objective of al-Qaeda is the expulsion of U.S. troops from the Persian Gulf region, and as a result there have been repeated attacks by terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden against American troops in Saudi Arabia and the region as a whole.
• FACT: Despite their rhetoric, democracies-including the United States-have routinely made concessions to suicide terrorists. Suicide terrorism is on the rise because terrorists have learned that it's effective.

It'd be comforting to know we now have such inately authoritative data regardig such a grave subject, but it's equally as troubling to see how that data casts such a dark shadow over the past several years of US public policy.