Author: Lee M.

Very interesting interview with Robert Pape, University of Chicago political scientist and author of Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism:

The American Conservative: Your new book, Dying to Win, has a subtitle: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Can you just tell us generally on what the book is based, what kind of research went into it, and what your findings were?

Robert Pape: Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. This research is conducted not only in English but also in native-language sources—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil, and others—so that we can gather information not only from newspapers but also from products from the terrorist community. The terrorists are often quite proud of what they do in their local communities, and they produce albums and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful to understand suicide-terrorist attacks.

This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.

TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.

RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.

More here.

Here’s an excerpt from the book Bono in Conversation (via Bunnie Diehl):

Assayas: Appalling things seem to happen when people become religious at too early an age or when their experience of life is nonexistent. Don’t you think?

Bono: Zealots often have no love for the world. They’re just getting through it to the next one. It’s a favorite topic. It’s the old cliché: “Eat shit now, pie in the sky when you die.” But I take Christ at his word: “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” As to the first part of your question, in my experience, the older you get, the less chance you have to transform your life, the less open you are to love in a challenging way. You tend towards love that’s more comforting and safe.

Assayas: As I told you, I think I am beginning to understand religion because I have started acting and thinking like a father. What do you make of that?

Bono: Yes, I think that’s normal. It’s a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the Universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma.

Assayas: I haven’t heard you talk about that.

Bono: I really believe we’ve moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.

Assayas: Well, that doesn’t make it clearer for me.

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the Universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so will you sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.

Assayas: I’d be interested to hear that.

Bono: That’s between me and God. But I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I’d be in deep shit. It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.

Assayas: The son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that.

Bono: But I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb. I love the idea that God says: Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there’s mortality as part of your very sinful nature, and let’s face it, you’re not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That’s the point. It should keep us humbled… It’s not our owngood works that get us through the gates of Heaven.

Assayas: That’s a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it’s close to lunacy , in my view. Christ has his rank among the world’sgreat thinkers. But Son of God, isn’t that farfetched?

Bono: No, it’s not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says, No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: “I’m the Messiah.” I’m saying: “I am God incarnate.” And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the “M” word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no, I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we’ve been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had King of the Jews” on his head, and was they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me that’s farfetched…

I detect in that last bit the influence of C.S. Lewis’ famous “trilemma argument”:

I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I am ready to accept Jesus as the great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a boiled egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (from Mere Christianity)

Will discusses Matthew Scully’s essay “Fear Factories” (via Marcus).

The rhetoric of animal “rights” is ill-conceived. The starting point, says Scully, should be with our obligations—the requirements for living with integrity. In defining them, some facts are pertinent, facts about animals’ emotional capacities and their experience of pain and happiness. Such facts refute what conservatives deplore—moral relativism. They do because they demand a certain reaction and evoke it in good people, who are good because they consistently respect the objective value of fellow creatures.

[…]

Animal suffering on a vast scale should, he says, be a serious issue of public policy. He does not want to take away your BLT; he does not propose to end livestock farming. He does propose a Humane Farming Act to apply to corporate farmers the elementary standards of animal husbandry and veterinary ethics: “We cannot just take from these creatures, we must give them something in return. We owe them a merciful death, and we owe them a merciful life.”

Says who? Well, Scully replies, those who understand “Judeo-Christian morality, whose whole logic is one of gracious condescension, or the proud learning to be humble, the higher serving the lower, and the strong protecting the weak.”

I’ve never quite been able to make up my mind whether the Clash’s London Calling is truly one of the greatest rock albums ever, or if it just misses being so by overreaching a bit. I mean, you’ve got, what, twelve songs in a row that are just killer, but once you get toward the end things start to get a bit threadbare, don’t they? Does anyone think “Lover’s Rock”, for instance, is a great song?

Maybe the double album is something to be avoided altogether? I have a hard time thinking of anyone who’s pulled it off sucessfully. Over the Rhine, who I love, didn’t quite do it with their Ohio – but I think you could’ve culled one really good album from that. By contrast, this year’s Drunkard’s Prayer has no filler whatsoever (though perhaps the extended saxaphone solo on “Little did I know” I could’ve done without).

But I’ll be happy to take nominations for double albums that are putative counterexamples to my thesis (and, no, the White Album doesn’t cut it either).

I’ve never gone out of my way to “brand” myself as a “Lutheran blogger.” For starters, my Lutheran identity isn’t rooted very deeply, having been attending Lutheran churches for only about four and a half years. Secondly, my “religious identity,” such as it is, has been formed by a lot of non-Lutheran influences – mainly Catholic and Anglican I suppose, though I have been deeply impressed recently by reading some of Gerhard Forde’s works, as well as the classic Gritsch & Jenson book on Lutheranism. And I can hardly think of a finer exposition of evangelical (in the continental sense) Christianity than Luther’s On Christian Liberty. Thirdly, I never wanted this blog to be narrowly theological, since I am, at best, a dilettante.

My point being that while I may not be a Lutheran blogger as such, there are plenty of fine ones out there (though they may not all care to be pigeonholed as such either). Not all of these have made it on to the much-coveted VI blogroll (ha!), but they’re all worth sampling:

• Confessing Evangelical (a British Lutheran!)
• Blog of Concord (Pastor Chip Frontz)
• Here We Stand
• Lutheran Chik’s “L” Word Diary
• Versus Populum
• Dash Goes to Church
• Melancthon Sins Boldly
• Endlessly Rocking (I think he’s Lutheran)
• Lutheran Confessions
• Kevin G. Powell (Lutheran pastor in Canada)
• xphiles (Lutheranism and “emerging church” issues)
• I Am a Christian Too (faith & progressive politics)

For some time now the loudest voices in the debate over how best to respond to the threat of terrorism have tended to be on the extremes. On the one hand, the Bush administration and most conservatives have taken the general line that the terrorists are simply evil nihilists who have no discernible political goals. On the other hand, the far left tends to see terrorism as an understandable (if not justified) response by the poor and downtrodden to injustices perpetrated by the U.S. in the Middle East and elsewhere.

I personally don’t completely buy either of these arguments, though I think there are elements of truth in both.

I believe that President Bush’s view that terrorists are merely evil people who hate freedom is overly simplistic, but so is, I suspect, the view that the terrorists are simply desperate people responding to American malevolence. While that is no doubt true in part, it downplays the role that Islamism as an ideology plays in all this (not to mention good old-fashioned original sin!).

Al-Qaeda and their ilk aren’t simply “anti-colonialists in a hurry” or some such. They have a (deeply repellent) vision of what they want their societies to be which is twisted and mixed-up with a kind of Arab nationalism all coupled with some legitimate greviances. For instance, they don’t just want an end to injustices against Palestinians, they want the Middle East cleansed of “Jews and Crusaders.” The fact that many of the actual terrorists have not, in fact, been desperately poor people but rather educated and relatively affluent is telling, I think. (For more on the roots of Islamism I would recommend the book Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. Berman thinks that Islamism is actually an Islamic mutation of European fascism.)

That said, I still think the best approach is patient law enforcement work to ferret out and disable terrorist cells, combined with military strikes only when necessary (for instance, I would judge Afghanistan to have been a justifiable war, but not Iraq) and a reduction of our presence in the Middle East, where we have, in fact, been guilty of wrong doing.

Here’s an interview with political scientist John Mueller that is free of much of the cant we tend to hear from both right and left.

Some samples:

Reason: You were opposed to the invasion of Iraq. All day today we’ve seen ghoulish opportunists on both sides of that debate making the claim that this proves their own view of U.S. policy. Is there any real conclusion we can draw from these attacks?

JM: In one sense it’s going to help Bush because it supports his argument that terrorism is still out there. On the other hand it undercuts the argument that the reason there haven’t been any terror attacks in the U.S. is because the terrorists are all tied down in Iraq. I don’t know that anybody has made that argument officially, or if Bush himself has made that argument, but it’s certainly been around. And Bush has implied it by saying Iraq is the central arena in the fight against terrorism. But this clearly wipes out that argument, which wasn’t a particularly good argument in the first place.

[…]

Reason: In your book The Remnants of War you see war as being increasingly de-normalized since the 18th century. How do attacks like these fit into that pattern?

JM: They’re not war; they’re terrorism. That’s why we call them terrorism. Crime will always be here, and so will terrorism. There will always be some nutcase with a bomb or some chemicals like the Unabomber. So when it’s really small like that, we tend to call it terrorism rather than war. When it gets large enough or sustained enough as in Iraq we tend to use phrases like guerilla war or unconventional war. Sporadic cases like this I don’t consider war.

Reason: 9/11 was pretty large and spectacular, and had a massive body count. By that definition, shouldn’t it count as an act of war?

JM: Yeah, you can make that case. The people who do the accounting had a lot of trouble with this and decided to call it a war. The usual threshold is about 1,000 battle deaths. That would obviously pass in this case. That attack was an outlier; there haven’t been any other terrorist attacks remotely that destructive, including today’s. But yes, quantifying that is a messy thing. I’m inclined not to think of 9/11 as war, not because of the body count but because it has to be a large enough group and has to be sustained. And once a year doesn’t count as sustained. I don’t want to downplay the significance of 9/11; I’m just disinclined to call it a war. But I can see how you might.

[…]

Reason: Are there any further civil society implications of an attack like today’s, especially in the case of London, which is famously loaded with surveillance cameras that apparently didn’t do much to prevent these attacks?

JM: They can’t prevent them, but they may be helpful in trying to identify what happened and who’s responsible. Even on a tragic day like this, the number of people who died is still pretty small compared to how many people are dying in automobile accidents. I don’t want to downplay the tragedy, but you simply can’t guarantee that that won’t happen. You can’t ensure the safety of every train, every bus, every taxicab, every moped, any more than you can guarantee you’ll never be mugged walking down the street. If they’re cost-effective, I’m in favor of measures that reduce the danger; but I’m wary of ones that are either counterproductive or more damaging than what’s been inflicted by the terrorists.

Reason: Short of further hot-war reactions, what is the proper way to bring the war to the terrorists rather than always being on the defensive?

JM: Well we’re always on the defensive with crime, right? Police try to catch criminals and deal with them, and we try to have some preventive measures, but unless the amount of destruction gets massively greater, it can be dealt with and absorbed. In the case of the Lockerbie bombing, we didn’t retaliate against anybody; we tried to go after the people who did it, and apparently were successful. And the same thing with the bombing in Spain, which is more directly relevant; they simply went after the people who did it, and apparently got them. And that seems to have satisfied people. They’re not happy about the tragedy, but the fact that you didn’t bash anybody with cruise missiles doesn’t seem to bother people.

Reason: But a crime-fighting approach to terrorism is an electoral loser in the United States. John Kerry got clobbered under this argument that after 9/11 he would have dispatched an army of lawyers rather than an army of soldiers. How do you make that approach politically palatable?

JM: Well you can try and make your rhetoric stronger than the other guy’s. But after the USS Cole was bombed, the real effort was to figure out who did it. Same thing with Lockerbie. During the Reagan Administration there were a bunch of terrorist activities that they didn’t do anything about except try to catch the people responsible. We haven’t done anything militarily about the Bali bombing. And after the first World Trade Center attack the reaction was really a police reaction. And nobody’s running around saying we should have done something else.

Reason: But they are. It’s a very common analysis that 9/11 happened because the U.S.—going back to the Rushdie case or the Beirut bombing or the Iranian hostage crisis—did not take a stronger line. And bin Laden has various quotes about American cowardice that seem to support that analysis.

JM: But a reaction can be counterproductive. And one of the things terrorists want is an overreaction. You haven’t seen that kind of reaction over the anthrax attacks. There’s been no demand that we attack Dublin or bomb a factory in Mozambique or anything like that. All they’re trying to do is catch the guy who did it, so far without success, and it doesn’t seem that anybody’s out marching in the streets over that.

In the case of Afghanistan there was a target, a place you could go. It’s extremely unlikely we’ll see many cases like that, including in the London case. What can we bomb? There’s no target, so what you’re left with is police work.

Reason: What do you make of the fact that the U.S. has, with some exceptions, been mostly free from major terror attacks since 9/11?

JM: The question is whether the terrorists exist in the United States. The FBI has not been able to find a single true terrorist cell in the U.S. So you get the head of the FBI saying that he’s really bothered by the things we’re not seeing. That’s Descartes updated: I think therefore they are.

Clearly it’s not the case that every single terrorist is so busy over in Iraq that they can’t bomb Brooklyn. But terrorism is a very rare thing that mostly doesn’t do much damage. 9/11 is obviously an exception to that. But the total number of people killed by international terrorism is small. So it’s not that common a thing in many respects.

Reason: How would you assess the current state of the war on terror, both on President Bush’s terms and according to your own thesis of war’s increasing obsolescence?

JM: In general it’s going pretty well. After 9/11 there was this big increase in cooperation among states. The fact that terrorists have been bombing places like Saudi Arabia means that every state sees them as a danger. So you’re not seeing much of the old-fashioned state-sponsored terrorism. The cooperation is imperfect, but a lot better than it was. It’s not clear how massive al Qaeda really is. Many people argue it’s not really an organization but just a movement. Five different websites have now claimed they did the London bombing, and all of them claim they’re connected to al Qaeda. Maybe they are mentally, but it’s hard to imagine they are in any organizational sense.

So I think it’s in pretty good shape. But the crime rate is also pretty good. That doesn’t mean crime doesn’t happen.

Bystanders fight off a crazed knife-wielding maniac, saving a young woman’s life.

(via Gene Healy)

• An interview with Kenyan economist James Shikwati who says “If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid.” (via Siris)
• Differing reflections on the London terrorist attacks from Timothy Burke and Caleb McDaniel (via Cliopatria). UPDATE: More thoughtful stuff from Prof. Burke here.
• Jonathan at The Ivy Bush has Stanley Hauerwas’ take.
• Methodist readers (and others) may be interested to learn that Bishop (and former Duke preacher and sometime Hauerwas collaborator) Will Willimon has a blog!
• Is Hume the greatest philosopher ever? Julian Baggini makes the case (via Arts & Letters Daily).

Long-time readers (both of you) may know of my checkered voting history – I voted for Bush in 2000, but, mostly because of disgruntlement with the Iraq war I voted for David Cobb of the Green Party in 2004. Which has led me to wonder, is there any Republican I could vote for now?
Well, 2008 is a long way away, but I like what I’m hearing from Chuck Hagel:

You’re one of a growing number of Republicans who have lately accused President Bush of botching the war in Iraq.

If someone says I am a disloyal Republican because I am not supporting my party, let them say it. War is bigger than politics.

[…]

How would you compare the situation in Iraq with the one in Vietnam?

Congress was absent during the Vietnam War, and they didn’t ask the tough questions, and consequently we lost 58,000 Americans and lost a war and humiliated this nation. It took a generation to get over it. As long as I am here as a U.S. senator, I am going to do whatever I can to make sure that isn’t going to happen.

[…]

On the other hand, with our deficit now exceeding $400 billion, aren’t we sort of out of money?

In terms of the deficit, we have blown the top right off. We’re a bunch of Democrats.

I’ve never heard anyone call President Bush a Democrat.

That’s my point. We’re less honest about it. We built the biggest government history has ever seen under a Republican government. The Democrats are better because they are honest about it. They don’t pretend. I admire that. They’ll say: ”We want more money. We need more money.”

Where do you think the Republican Party needs to go?

I’d take it back to the party of Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan. It was a pretty simple party in those days. It was all about limited government, fiscal responsibility, strong national defense and pro-trade foreign policy.

Will that be your message in your 2008 presidential campaign?

Well, first of all, I haven’t said I am running.

You are rumored to be a candidate.

As John McCain has said to me, Anyone who is not in detox is rumored to be a candidate.

[…]

Actually, I think it’s warped to talk about 2008 so much. Pundits care too much about betting on the next winner, and then they lose interest once the contest is over.

That’s because there’s a dynamic to politics that has lately been overtaken by show business. Politics is show business. It’s just show business for the ugly. It’s Hollywood without all the beautiful people.

More from Hagel here.