DYING TO WIN: Why Suicide Terrorists Do It
by Robert A Pape
Gibson Square £18.99 pp336

These books are the product of secular academic distaste for talk of “evil-doers”. They reflect an inherent leftist assumption that all resort to theological language is morally simplistic especially when used by George W Bush. So what do they tell us about terrorism that Dostoevsky or Conrad could not?

Louise Richardson, an Irish-American academic, disarmingly admits that in another life she might have joined the IRA. Instead, she teaches terrorism studies at Harvard, where apparently as a result of her lessons about Hamas (or at least its crèches and facilities for the disabled), “once they learned about terrorists, they (the students) didn’t think they were terrorists anymore”.

Sandwiched between these revelations, and sensible advice to governments to use aid and negotiation rather than military means to disaggregate and reduce the number of terrorist challenges, is an informed and lively account of this worrying phenomenon. Terrorism is a tactic and a state of mind that ranges from righteous rage to the psychotic. Terrorists are “sub-state actors”, too weak to fight conventional campaigns, who target civilians to achieve goals that are unattainable through the ballot box, sometimes on the specious grounds that tax- paying voters are culpable for their government’s foreign policy.

Terrorist goals range from comprehensible nationalist or indeed democratic grievances, of the sort represented by South Africa’s ANC or the Algerian FLN, to the insanities espoused by the German Red Army Faction, Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo or Al-Qaeda. Beneath the strategic goals lies the quest for “revenge, renown and reaction” — Richardson’s shorthand description of terrorist mind-sets. Absolute deprivation is ruled out, since not many terrorists are from sub-Saharan Africa or Haiti. Revenge is the reward for some actual or imagined grievance, although it can take the form of crowing “21 and rising” after killing that many Israelis, or “two for the price of one” when the IRA shot a pregnant RUC officer. Renown is a television audience of 900m for killing 11 Israeli athletes, or, more personally, the transformation described by an IRA bomber: “I was no longer an insignificant teenager. I became heroic overnight. I felt drunk with power.” Reaction is the American retreat from Lebanon or Somalia, although it can also result in military blowback, as in Argentina, Brazil or Uruguay, and the destruction of the terrorists by such grisly methods as throwing suspects out of helicopters.

Robert A Pape’s Dying to Win is more narrowly focused on suicide bombing. He has analysed data on the 315 suicide attacks that occurred during 1980-2002, information distilled into graphs and diagrams and some dubious interlinked commentary of a social “science” variety. His conclusion is that suicide bombing is a rational and popular strategy with a “limited” objective often carried out by “altruistic” volunteers, as opposed to the hard-core group members who sanction it. The aim is to coerce democracies (generously defined to include Russia) into withdrawing their forces from territory that the terrorists (and many of their fellow countrymen) regard as their homeland. Religious differences merely sharpen these antagonisms, although ingenious exegesis usefully overcomes powerful taboos against suicide within all leading monotheisms.

The religious part of this argument is unexceptional. There is nothing “Islamist” about the Hindu Tamil Tigers (fighting Singhalese Buddhists) or the Kurdistan Workers’ party, Marxists fighting for autonomy from their Turkish Sunni brethren. But while it is true that the first manifestation of this tactic (by Hezbollah in Beirut in 1983) did result in American and French forces withdrawing, it is harder to follow Pape in ascribing such modest ambitions to Al-Qaeda. Its objectives have long since multiplied from merely ejecting the “Crusader-Zionists” from bases in Saudi Arabia, to an all-out onslaught against a decadent western society oppressing the global umma, conducted by a virtual army drawn from Baluchistan to Bradford. His book fails to mention anti-semitism.

The simplest explanation of suicide bombing may be the best. It is 12 times more lethal than other forms of terrorism — while constituting only 3% of all terrorist attacks, suicide bombings account for 48% of fatalities notched up by terrorists. At $500,000, 9/11 was a cheap way of killing 3,000 people and causing damage in the billions.

Pape’s rather leaden discussion of the psychology of suicide ignores such subtleties as the ways in which posthumous videos of the joyous fanatics leave no room for retribution by the victim population, nor the dismal role of matriarchs such as the Palestinian mother of a suicide bomber who killed those 21 Israelis, and who indicated she had nine more children. But then we are back with the mystery of human evil and should turn to our Dostoevsky and Conrad, leaving the modern academy to its moral confusions.

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