Suicide Bombers

David Bromwich reviewed two books on terrorism in the 1-23-06 New Republic. While dismissing "Holy Terror" by Terry Eagleton, he praised "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" by Robert A. Pape. Pape's purpose "is to work out a strategy for eliminating the present generation of terrorists without supplying the political and imaginative soil for another generation to grow." His study of terrorist acts concludes that occupation by foreigners rather than religious zealotry is the main motivation for suicide bombers.

Terrorism, the murder of the innocent to achieve a political end, goes back at least to the Shia assassins of the twelfth century, and probably further back than that. It may occur wherever a religious or political ideal takes hold that has the power to absolve its believers of the wrong that they commit in its name. Suicide bombing is a more desperate and in some settings a more cunning adaptation of terrorism; but any terrorist is a hunted man who knows that his death may not lag far behind the deaths of his latest victims. Only a messianic politician, at the mercy of his own wildness and simplicity, could suppose it possible to conduct a worldwide purge of terrorism until one by one the guilty are subtracted and "all of the terrorists are dead."

The motives for suicide terror may be roughly divided into (1) religious fulfillment; (2) revenge; (3) founding a state; and (4) resistance to occupation. Among the seventy-one who killed themselves in the years 1995-2003, twice as many came from Muslim countries with a significant fundamentalist population as from those without it, but an Al Qaeda suicide bomber was ten times more likely to come from a country occupied by the United States than from an unoccupied country. A coercive foreign presence intensifies the injured pride, rage, and indignation that lead to suicide attacks.

President Bush believes that democracy is something every people wants, because the God of all has put a wish for democracy into every person on earth. The documentary testimony of Pape's killers suggests that what everybody wants is something cruder and less definite: a nation.