Contra Pape
I like Martin Kramer’s response to the Pape theory about suicide terrorism. Some highlights:
Professor Pape’s thesis has resonated quite widely, and before I approach it, let me say a word about why I think it has had such an appeal. Why are people eager to find his thesis plausible?
First, it is reassuring. No one likes the idea that we may have embarked on a generations-long struggle against growing tides of suicidal fanatics. Professor Pape tells us that it need not be so, that we have it in our power to stop it now ...
Second, it is empirical. The speculative and polemical interpretations and counter-interpretations of the threat confuse us. We want metrics, pie charts and graphs—something quantifiable and proven. Even when we know that databases can be flawed, samples can be too small, and statistics can be misleading, we still perk up at the first slide of the Powerpoint.
Third, it is secular. The idea of religion as an independent variable is foreign to our mode of thought. As a result, our political sciences have almost nothing to say about it. And what really scares us is Islam, which seems to combine bottomless grievance and limitless ambition. But nationalism—well, that’s a horse of a different color: we have faced it before, its aims are limited, and with nationalists you can sometimes cut a deal and split the difference. Say that Al-Qaeda is really just Arabian nationalism, and people will listen.
Kramer goes on to describe how Pape’s thesis doesn’t really fit the Israel/Palestine conflict, concluding:
The suicide bombings, pioneered by Hamas originally in open defiance of the PLO, were superficially an emulation of the Lebanese precedent. But they have never served a conventional nationalist concept of liberation. By bombing in Israel proper and against civilians, Hamas and its rivals actually achieved the opposite of nationalist goals: the attacks brought about a reoccupation of much of the West Bank, the legitimation of Israel’s security fence, and the loss of international sympathy, traditionally a core element of Palestinian national strategy. It substituted for these tangible assets a crowd-pleasing spectacle of death in Israel’s cities, which other groups were quick to copy to preserve their market share.
So the suicide attacks seem disconnected from a nationalist “strategic logic.” What the attacks have unquestionably achieved is shattering the political monopoly of the PLO. I submit that was their purpose. True, the Islamized strategy bears a superficial resemblance to a nationalist one. But look closely: the objectives have grown larger (all of Palestine, elimination of Israel), the timeline has grown longer, winning minds has become more important than regaining territory, and international sympathy has lost its strategic significance. In the Palestinian case, the occupation is the context of the suicide bombing, and it is the fuel. But ending the occupation is not the prime objective of the suicide campaign. The Palestinian bombings are spectacles intended to win over converts and build an identity over time.
Yet another reason why Pape’s thesis is so comfy is the seamless way it appeals to our ethnocentrism. It is apparently counter-intuitive to think that Arabs or Muslims could be doing all these earth-shattering things primarily to influence each other rather than us. Yet the stated aim of Islamist political groups is to replace all existing governments of Muslim countries with a Caliphate, and to do that Islamists need to beat their political rivals on their home territories. Ambulance chasing and seeking to exploit and and capture the initiative on any conflict involving Muslims anywhere in the world is their most persistent strategy, regardless of which tactics are in vogue at any given time. Conflicts which they think benefit political rivals more than themselves will be ignored, foreign occupation or no. Gilles Kepel argues persuasively in Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam that the purpose of switching to Western targets was to reinvigorate a political movement which had seemingly exhausted every means within the Middle East to effect the desired revolution.
(And yes, I’m way overdue on posting a review of Kepel’s book along with many others ...)
