The Gertrude Bell Jar

Some Subtle Media Criticism

I watched a documentary about Daniel Pearl last night, called The Journalist and the Jihadi, produced by HBO, and narrated by Christiane Amanpour. It was interesting enough, but it did that irritating thing where the only question any terrorist is ever shown being asked and answering is “Do you feel any remorse?” And of course they always say “No.”

Maybe somebody could send around some kind of helpful memo about this? Saying:

Dear Journalists: Jihadis think they are in a war and that everyone who isn’t in their army is an enemy troop. Hence they are never sorry for killing anyone. Just deal with it already and move on with your life, okay? Which could include maybe asking them something your viewers might be curious about when you have the chance. Like you could ask them whether the leaders of their particular cell think Islamic law permits the use of nuclear or chemical weapons against civilians in jihad, or whether their mothers dropped them all on their heads when they were babies, or something like that. Any question we don’t already all know the answer to will do, really. Since this information is apparently very, very hard to remember, please refer to this helpful FAQ when preparing to interview an Islamist terrorist:

Is the jihadi sorry for what he’s done?  NO

Does the jihadi feel any remorse?  NO

Does the jihadi think he did the right thing?  YES

Does the jihadi feel that God approves of his act?  YES

Maybe all the journalists working these stories could write the answers down on a card and tape it to their foreheads, so that they’re always reminded of it whenever they see each other at the hotel.

I don’t know why this gets up my nose so much. I guess it’s because it’s always such a waste of an opportunity to hear absolutely anything else these people might have to say. It’s like if the world press were covering some big astrophysics conference and every single journalist just kept asking attendees if they expected the sun to rise in the West the next morning, and kept carefully noting down the answer every time it was given, over and over again, until press time was over.

I mean come on, it’s been years now, figure it out.

Scientism Is The New Spaghetti Monster

Harold Henderson had an interesting blog entry last month discussing some critical reactions to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, particularly Thomas Nagel’s (available in full, and well worth reading, here):

The key question is whence came design in nature. Dawkins says God's no explanation, because then you have to explain God. But on this field Nagel is a pro and Dawkins is an amateur: "All explanations come to an end somewhere," explains Nagel, since Dawkins evidently didn't do the reading. "On either view [Dawkins's secularism or the God hypothesis], the ultimate explanation is not itself explained.

The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics." Having laid out the rules of the match, Nagel finds that the God hypothesis loses round one, since "the theory of evolution through heritable variation and natural selection" explains how intricate designs such as the eye can come about naturally, and hence these designs no longer provide evidence for the God hypothesis.

But round two is still being fought out, because the evolutionary process is undergirded by DNA. And since DNA itself can't have evolved, where did it come from? "At this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery -- an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry."

Of course that could change, and likely will if we can keep the theocrats at bay and dispassionate biological research going. (BTW, Nagel isn't buying Dawkins's idea that everything can be reduced to physics in any case. No matter what anyone says, your own experience of being aware isn't the same thing as neurons firing in the brain. Some things are just . . . different.)[Emphasis Henderson’s]

I don’t question evolution, but I do think claiming that it proves the non-existence of God is pure hubris, and a little obtuse besides. Whether or not one must read Genesis literally to validate the entire text and meaning of the Bible is a theological question, not a scientific one. (Of course, attempting to have the teaching of “Intelligent Design” replace the teaching of evolution in high school science classes is obtuse in the equal and opposite way.)

It’s been borne in on me lately, though, that Dawkins et al are talking about a lot more than defending the quality of science education in our nation’s public schools. This entry at GetReligion discusses a recent report of a conference of scientists on the subject of science and religion, and points to a number of scientists making rather exorbitant claims about what the replacement of religion itself with science can do for you and me. According to the New York Times:

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Apparently this is not an exaggeration of the kinds of claims made for the awesome power of science at the conference:

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

Although there was some pushback from more skeptical types too:

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

The interesting thing is, they really are pretty much mirror images, and not just because they are “extremists.” What strikes me the most about the scientists’ comments here (apart from the breathtaking historical ignorance, about Western intellectual history in general and the bloody 20th Century in particular), is how much they seem to attribute some kind of power or force to religion itself, independent of human agency. Whereas, as a long-time atheist*, I had thought we all understood that religion is merely a human project, invented by and for humans, to fulfill human ends. This means that it may not say anything very true about the world per se, but by definition it says a very great deal about us. It strikes me as fundamentally superstitious to think that religion is doing things to us (as opposed to us doing things with religion); and it’s remarkable that the anti-religious scientists quoted above not only seem to want to attribute agency to religion itself, but to identify it as the source of human evil as well.

Now that is superstition! Because if there IS no devil, then religion can’t BE the devil. We’re just stuck with ourselves all over again, and blaming religion is just more special pleading on behalf of a benighted if self-regarding species.

The application of science to the human (the part that's "just different" from physics) has what you might charitably call a checkered past. I'm thinking of Marxism, Freudianism, social Darwinism, etc. Whenever I read anything about Richard Dawkins lately I think about the work of Pascal Boyer, a psychologist who has been exploring the possible cognitive causes of religious modes of thought in humans, and this Wired article about a specific type of cognitive malfunction that seems to be common in math and science types. I think it might be that “scientifically” designed societies and social policies tend to be relentlessly anti-human in practice because actively suppressing the religious impulse, or whatever aspect of the human gives rise to and supports it, slips some crucial gears, gears we’re always supposed to be hitting. Our cognitive capacities evolved the way they did for some reason or other, no? So again I think a little humility is called for, perhaps especially by people who don’t understand or share the religious impulse that most people seem to have.

*Admittedly going a bit wobbly of late, but leave that aside for now.

Edited to add: Some friends of mine have gently pointed out that scientists actually do have a pretty workable theory of how DNA came to be, which makes me feel a bit silly for reposting the Nagel link that uncritically. However, I don't think it affects his underlying point. Nagel was positing DNA (implausibly, it turns out) as the point at which we are forced to acknowledge that God might have intervened, but it needn't be. There is still the flummoxing question of why the natural world exists at all in the first place.

Letter From Fallujah

My brother-in-law, a U.S. Marine who’s currently serving at Camp Fallujah, forwarded this around over the weekend. He says it’s pretty spot-on, and he thinks he knows the guy who wrote it (but no, the author is not my brother-in-law).

I saw him briefly in the Spring; we were all in town for a family member’s funeral (he’d gotten permission for leave well in advance, as the death was not unexpected). In the few minutes I had to chat with him about Iraq when his kids were not in the room, he told me that the Iraqi army recruits they are training are definitely getting better (they manage to actually hit targets with artillery, for example, something the Iraqi Army did not seem able to do at all during the invasion), but that it will take “a long time” before the new Iraqi Army is really good to go.

"Kiss the Koran, big guy."

I found that Michael Cook link in a series of interesting posts on the Pope kerfuffle from a Christian perspective at GetReligion: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I found the discussion of universalism (see links 3 & 5) particularly interesting because I am currently working on an article about the treatment of Islamist terrorism in Bollywood movies (which I may try to flog to a print outlet somewhere--I'll let you, my faithful 3 readers, know if anything comes of it). Indian patriotism rests on the proposition that all sectarian differences can be overcome by loyalty to the Indian nation and Indian identity, but sometimes this belief seems to be an expression of Hindu universalism. In one scene in Zakhm, for example, a woman whose very existence is posited by the movie as the proof of the nationalist claim is shown first to pray in the Muslim fashion, then kiss a crucifix, then honor a portrait of a Hindu god. This might be seen by Hindus as a legitimate faith practice, but neither Christians nor Muslims would see it as a practice of Christianity or Islam. Hindus undoubtedly believe that all faith traditions can be safe in a Hindu-dominated nation, and this is most likely true. But is this claim likely to be persuasive to fundamentalist monotheists? Probably not.

In other Pope news, Austin Bay has an interesting article up about the propaganda value of "Muslim rage" media events for Islamists.

Cook Lecture

I’m adding a new item to the sidebar, a transcript of a talk by Michael Cook, a scholar of medieval Islam and Islamic history, with follow-up questions from assorted journalists. He addresses questions of jihad, the status of Muhammad, the political nature of Islam, etc. etc. It covers a lot of a ground, it’s all worth a read. A new name for my infinitely lengthening "to read" list!

Imperial Hubris by "Anonymous"

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by "Anonymous."

I've mentioned this book (which is now known to have been written by former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer) before, in a brief comment about one of its many flaws, but got hung up on writing the review, I think because I wanted to write the mother of all scathing indictments, but was honestly too infuriated and exasperated by this whole book to be able to sustain any coherent writing on it.

But time heals! I find, looking it over again, that a response I posted in another forum to a query about Scheuer a long while ago will do as a review. The questioner had seen Scheuer among the talking heads on tv commenting on the 7/7 London bombings, and was flummoxed by his "provocative yet ultimately mystifying talking points," and asked if anyone knew what was up with that.

I replied: I didn't hear what Scheuer was saying last week, but I have read his book. His basic argument is: nearly all Muslims in the Middle East are secretly Islamists, no matter what they try to tell you. Our policy options therefore are: 1. To withdraw entirely to fortress America (no more oil-buying or any other kind of trading relationship with any regime in the Middle East, and no support whatsoever for Israel or any other nation in the region and indeed no diplomatic relationship with anyone of any kind there, no more pc environmentalism preventing full exploitation of our own oil resources, no more pc civil-rights concerns preventing full defense of the homeland) or 2. Go on a total war footing, in which we understand that our purpose is to kill as many Middle Eastern Muslims as possible, or at least sufficiently to fully subjugate and terrify any survivors (hence, the book has chapter titles like "Get Good At And Used to Killing.") Pull completely out or kill 'em all, basically.

To Scheuer, in other words, the uber-fallacy is to believe that there are any Muslims in the Middle East who do not secretly want to overthrow their governments and install Osama bin Laden as their caliph in a Talibanesque Islamic state. The neocon agenda is therefore delusional, since the establishment of such a caliphate would be the inevitable outcome of allowing Muslims to vote. A right-wing militaristic response is delusional to the extent that it continues to attempt to minimize civilian casualties and be somewhat selective in regards to targets. A left-wing negotiation response is delusional because there is no negotiating with this basic antipathy to our very existence; there can be only stupid good faith on our part and lying for temporary advantage on theirs.

It's difficult to overstate the magnitude of his error here. (Although the bibliography to his book offers a partial explanation of it; Scheuer does not read Arabic nor has he made any effort to read about any of these issues from a Muslim or Arab perspective in English or English translation. His whole reading diet from the Middle Eastern perspective has apparently been propaganda missives from al Qaeda and a handful of fellow-travellers as provided by CIA translators, and from the Western perspective various iterations of conservative national defense punditry, plus the literature that has grown up around the "clash of civilizations" theory as applied in the Middle East.) But his argument for it is: Condemnation of Israel and U.S. support for Israel is nearly universal in the Middle East; al Qaeda condemns Israel and the U.S. on the same basis; therefore support for al Qaeda must be universal in the Middle East. This is a little like saying: Nearly all Americans condemn terrorism on their own soil; Bush condemns terrorism also; therefore nearly all Americans must be Bush supporters. Whereas of course we know that all significant political actors in the U.S. condemn terrorism; the competition among them is not about whether to be against terrorism, but about what to do about it. And in fact the same is true of the Middle East (though for equivalency in at least numbers read "Pat Buchanan" supporters for "Osama bin Laden" supporters); all political actors in the Middle East have condemned Israel and U.S. support for it to varying degrees since 1948; the question of which group is best able to mobilize and maintain support for itself based on its approach to the issue is the highly variable and contigent one. And all of this is trivially obvious from even a cursory glance at Middle Eastern history or at the very small amount of public polling data available.

I found myself worrying a lot more about the quality of foreign policy analysis at the CIA than about the Iraq War after reading this book. Some of his criticism of U.S. policy is quite correct, and his knowledge of al Qaeda itself at the operational (but not ideological) level is very useful. But the underlying perspective is just warped and flat-out wrong.

Another commenter asked if I thought any of this theory could be based on ancient views of warfare, when people believed that the only way to successfully assimilate another culture was to kill all the men and take all the women for the conquerors, and also, " … what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?"

I replied: I haven't read any of theory of warfare type books that were listed in his bibliography, but it wouldn't surprise me if a fair number of them went into the kind of discussion you're talking about and might have influenced his own take on things. IIRC the specific historical example he used to critique the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was WWII, or specifically the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan, to make the point that the post-WWII occupations were much easier to handle than either of the current ones because such a large portion of the civilian population as well as the military had been killed already in the war; the Germans and Japanese were totally beaten down and hence docile at war's end in this view.

I mean, what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?

Cowering and awaiting instructions, presumably. So would the occupations of Germany and Japan lead one to believe. Of course there was little else they could have done at the time, the idea of international terrorism by nonstate actors not having been thought of yet, and not as easily done anyway with the available technology. But this is where his notion of fortress America comes in, I suppose.

The original questioner commented that Scheuer had indeed given off a bit of a "crackpot" vibe, and that perhaps he was intentionally a little cagey about what he was actually saying, since being too clear might well put him on the "do not call back" list.

I replied: I think he manages to sound reasonable enough even in most of his book. It's common enough, after all, to point out the differences between the German and Iraqi occupations as I mentioned below. But to most people this is just a difference in the outcome of two very different approaches to warfare in which the latter version is vastly preferable on its own hook; the point of bringing it up is just to recognize the difficulties that seem to follow comparatively low casuality warfare and propose ways to address them, or to critique Dubya for failing to plan for them in advance, etc. I think Scheuer is probably the only commentater I've encountered who thinks the correct answer would have been to have gone all Dresden on Iraq in the first place. I'm guessing he just doesn't include the crazy part when he's talking on tv.

Today In Islamophobia

City of Brass has an excellent essay answering science fiction writer Dan Simmons’ blog post about a “Century War with Islam” and the Eurabia argument in general. Meanwhile, reason columnist Cathy Young argues with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch et al and Oriana Fallaci, and replies to Spencer’s replies here and here.

Suicide Geeks Redux

Further to my earlier posts on the strange relationship between geekiness and suicide terrorism (1, 2, 3), I just came across a couple more theories on the subject, in Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Great Theft (El Fadl prefers the term "puritans" for Islamists):

… puritans reject inquiries into philosophy, political theory, morality, and beauty, as too subjective -- and, even worse, as Western inventions that lead to nothing but sophistry. With the majority of the puritan leadership comprised of people who studied the physical sciences, such as medicine, engineering, and computer science, they avowedly anchor themselves in the objectivity and certitude that comes from empiricism. According to puritans, public interests, such as the interest in protecting society from the sexual lures of women, can be empirically verified. However, in contrast, they say, moral or ethical values and aesthetic judgments about what is necessary or compelling cannot be empirically quantified, and therefore must be ignored. So values like human dignity, love, mercy, and compassion are not subject to quantification, and therefore cannot be integrated into Islamic legal judgments. (p. 99)

And:

Puritans are not opposed to modernism, but, somewhat inconsistently, they believe that modernity is a culturally biased concept. For puritans, the culture of modernity, with its concepts of human rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious freedom, civil society, pluralism, and democracy, is largely Western, and therefore both alien and alienating. However, puritans strongly distinguish between the culture of modernity and modernization. Often this amounts to differentiating between modernization and Westernization -- the former is acceptable, but the latter is not. To become truly modernized, according to the puritans, means to regress back in time and recreate the golden age of Islam. This, however, does not mean that they want to abolish technology and scientific advancements. Rather, their program is deceptively simple -- Muslims should learn the technology and science invented by the West, but in order to resist Western culture, Muslims should not seek to study the social sciences or humanities. This is the reason that a large number of puritans come to the West to study, but invariably focus their studies on the physical sciences, including computer science, and entirely ignore the social sciences and humanities. Armed with modern science and technology, puritans believe that they will be better positioned to recreate the golden age of Islam by creating a society modeled after the Prophet’s city-state in Medina and Mecca. (p. 170-171)

Notes On "Offensive Realism"

I posed a question in another forum last week about the Mearsheimer/Walt paper, and thought the results were interesting enough to repost here:

Drezner has a round-up of some of the more worthwhile responses to the Mearsheimer & Walt paper on the Israel lobby. I thought Jacob Levy’s thoughts were particularly interesting. Mr. Bell Jar was a student of Mearsheimer’s in the 1980s, and had already mentioned to me how odd it was for Mearsheimer to entertain the idea that a domestic political lobby might be exerting any significant influence on U.S. foreign policy, since the realist school Mearsheimer has helped to create pretty much dismisses internal national politics as a relevant factor in how states conduct international relations. Levy touches briefly on this issue, but more forcefully questions the way Mearsheimer’s opposition to the Iraq War undermines his standard view that states always act in their own security interests:

M&W are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They're also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there's a puzzle, an anomaly-- of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there's a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world.

I know more than a few readers here have studied Mearsheimer, and possibly one or two have been actual students of his as Mr. Bell Jar has. I’m wondering: Is the forgoing a fair characterization of Mearsheimer’s theories about states other than the U.S. with reference to Israel, and conflicts other than the Iraq War? I’m wondering because, if so, then the entire argument about the Israel lobby would seem more like an attempt to explain away holes in his previous arguments than anything else. (Mearsheimer also published a widely-read article on why the U.S. should continue to pursue a containment strategy towards Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion). Or as commenter Kevin Donoghue puts it in the comment thread on Levy’s post over at Crooked Timber:

their theory (or at least the version Mearsheimer expounded in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics) is contradicted by the facts and that’s what they are wrestling with. Putting it another way, it is their anxiety to rescue their theory which is pushing them. Actually I think M/W are snookered: either states are not rational in pursuit of their interests, or it was in America’s interest to invade Iraq.

Is that fair to say? I don’t know Mearsheimer’s work well enough to judge.

P. said: I would argue that is an unfair characterization. In the introduction to Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, he outlines the limits of offensive realism, his theory. He would probably place the Iraq War situation in the anomalies that offensive realism simply does not explain.

Offensive realism does not explain these situations because it is parsimonious theory - it simplifies reality. It tries to treat states as black boxes or billiard balls, and does not really look to the internal characteristics of states. It discards factors, and the main one it discards are attention to individuals or domestic political considerations. When these factors dominate a state's decision making process, realist theories will just not predict as well. T

here are also situations where offensive realism does not tell you what the proper answer is. There are situations where several different outcomes are consistent with the theory. In these cases, offensive realism will be indeterminate as to the outcome. Other theories have to be brought in to try and figure out what is going on.

Lastly, there will be situations where great powers act contrary to what the theory predicts (the anomalous cases). Inevitably, such behavior causes negative consequences, according to Mearsheimer, and that's what he would probably say is happening with Iraq. All of this can be inferred, I believe, from pages 9-12 of Tragedy.

Mr. Bell Jar said:  Three general points -- first, Walt was always much, much squishier on Realism than Mearsheimer was. (We used to joke that you lost rigor as you dropped letters off of "Waltz". See, there was a neoliberal scholar named Alt... Okay, it wasn't much of a joke. We were grad students.)

Second, I haven't read Tragedy of International Relations, because I haven't found a cheap copy yet. All my exposure to Mearsheimer was in 1988-1990, when the 'near enemy' was still risible exponents of soft power like Keohane and Nye. However, I think the notion of a Great Power (indeed, pretty much the only Great Power left) expanding into areas of direct national-security importance like the Persian Gulf can be considered easily explicable by the Realist doctrine we all learned from Prof. Mearsheimer. The question is, are there enough other Powers who will attempt to balance against us, or aren't there? (Which is to say -- morality aside, have we fatally overstretched in Iraq and roused the other Powers, or not?) Given our continued closeness to Britain and the burgeoning new alliance with India, I think the case of fatal overstretch must remain unproven as yet.

Third, at least back in my day, we all knew that Realism wasn't necessarily predictive of state behavior, but of the consequences -- a state that departed from Realist principles (which we all knew they did; the arguments were about boundary cases like Chamberlain in 1938) would get its comeuppance sooner rather than later. (For example, biology doesn't say people will never try to breathe water. It only says that they will drown if they do.) Some of us did use Newtonian arguments -- "Left to itself, a state with opportunity to expand its power will do so," but we always knew there was a big blur over "left to itself."

But yes, I do find it odd that Mearsheimer is now paying attention to questions of internally-driven motives for state behavior -- that was never his bailiwick, or even particularly interesting to him, at least not back in the Day. My theory is that as far as their paper goes, he was mostly concerned with the strategic question of supporting Israel (does it make Realpolitikal sense to ally with one state rather than eleven?) and that Walt was the guy with the rest of the baggage.

G. said: When I took his class in 2002 he seemed a contradiction. I lost count of the number of times he said, "States are basically strategic calculators." If this was supposed to be an "ideal gas" model without any perfect example in the real world, he didn't stress the point. And yet he said almost as many times that the invasion would be a mistake. I never got around to asking what it would mean if our strategic calculator chose invasion anyway. I think it's this contradiction that pushed Mearsheimer into domestic politics. So I agree with Levy.

H. said:  Oh. I thought that Realism was supposed to be prescriptive, not descriptive. Learn something new every day!

P. replied:  It is both a descriptive theory and a prescriptive theory. It is a descriptive theory inasmuch as it says this is how the world (unfortunately) works. It is a prescriptive theory inasmuch as it says, if this how the world really works, then this is how you should behave so that you can survive.

I replied:  Which pretty much guarantees that the world will go on working that way, no? This is why people who don't really know much about the details of Realist theory intuitively think it is evil anyway, I suspect.

P. replied:  That's why it's the "tragedy" of great power politics. Even if a great power wanted to be benevolent, or even just be left alone, they would be forced by circumstances (generally the aggressive behaviors of other states) to behave in a realist manner. That's the tragedy - the inescapable spiral down to behavior of the lowest common denominator.

Part of it, also, is the American liberal tradition that's reflected in our foreign policy rhetoric. Americans don't like realists - Americans want to be better than that, and there's a section in the introduction to Tragedy that talks about that as well.

And part of it, I think, is that there are some versions of realism that are evil, and some proponents of it who are evil, e.g. Henry Kissinger.

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 ...)