The buggy series on terrorism, which started at the end of July, continues in this article, the second of probably a good three or four such articles. Today's exposition is something of an interlude in the buggy series, at any rate as originally planned --- not that it's unimportant; just the opposite. Devoted entirely to an analysis of a recently published book by a University of Chicago political scientist, Robert Pape --- Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism --- the buggy article grapples at length with Pape's argument and views . . . which, as it happens, have caused a big splash in numerous circles, especially those highly critical of the Bush administration's war on terror. Some reviewers --- all non-specialists in the field of jihad terrorism, it needs to be added --- have called the Pape book groundbreaking and profound. Well, maybe groundbreaking if that means an entirely new perspective on Islamist terrorisms of the sort represented by Al Qaeda; but not necessarily profound if that means the basic Pape argument and views on the topic aren't without serious problems and flaws.

It doesn't follow, though, that the book has no merit at all. If it didn't, there'd be no reason for prof bug to dissect and criticize it at length.

The book's merits and what they amount to can quickly be set out here in the remarks that unfold in part one of today's buggy article. In part two, Pape's argument will be summarized first in conventional capsule form, then in a series of pivotal propositions that set it out argument in a more systematic manner. The latter, propositional way of presenting Pape's ideas, evidence, and logic has a double advantage for us: it will enable you, the buggy visitor, to follow more clearly the overall thrust of Pape's argument and more specific ramifications; and --- no less important --- it will allow prof bug in parts three and four to probe and lay out clearly the problems and shortcomings of that argument by paralleling its various major propositions.

Needless to add, the heart of the buggy analysis lies in these criticisms.

They will question several of his ideas, much of his evidence --- quantitative and qualitative alike --- and the logic and thrust of his overall argument. First, though, ponder the introductory comments. They'll provide you with a working-idea of how Pape's book and the buggy dissection and criticism of it fit in with the current buggy series on jihad terrorism that started almost a full month ago.



PART ONE:
SOME LEAD-IN COMMENTS ABOUT DYING TO WIN

The Pape Argument At Odds with the Buggy Argument about Islamist Terrorism

By now, prof bug's main motive in tackling the Pape book should be clear: its argument collides head-on with the kind of analysis of jihad terrorism --- and especially its connections to radical Islamism (or Islamic fundamentalism if you prefer) --- that was set out in the initial article in the current buggy series. In particular, if Pape is right, the buggy view is wrong. If Pape's argument is fundamentally flawed, the buggy view might still meet with some legitimate criticisms down the road, but at least it will have survived intact the kind of clashing view that informs Pape's book. It's that simple.

(For more clarification of the terms Islamist and fundamentalist by Martin Kramer --- a gifted scholar of the Middle East who has roasted the pc-infested professors who dominate the Middle East Studies Association in this country for their rosy and chronic apologetics of Islamic fundamentalism and their total failure therefore to anticipate or predict Al Qaeda-like terrorism --- click here and here. This link will take you to the Kramer site that lists all his articles available online. In typical underhanded, below-the-belt pc-efforts to discredit Kramer personally, Juan Cole --- a leading apologist for Islamist extremism and even terrorism who is also the current president of he Middle East Studies Association --- sent a "confidential" email to some his fellow apologists that urged them to try and uncover some dirt about Kramer personally in order to smear him. The email went out recently. It quickly leaked out to Kramer. See what it says on the Kramer site and Kramer's astonished and detailed replies.

(Cole's behavior, to repeat, isn't something unusual. Far from that, it's fully in line with the authoritarianism and smear-tactics of pc-academics who --- faced with intellectual opponents of superior intelligence, knowledge, and scholarly work --- can't handle their critics' work in standard intellectual ways and resort to a series of low-blow stratagems to keep their pieties intact.

(As you'll see in later parts of this article, one of the many problems that bedevil Pape's understanding of radical Islamic fundamentalism is his overwhelming reliance on scholars like Cole and other pillars of the Middle East Studies Association and their excuse-making apologia such as John Esposito of Georgetown.

(Simply note in passing a few wrong-headed fatuities from some of MESA's leading members. In 1998, Esposito wrote that "focusing on Osama bin Laden risk[s] catapulting one of the many sources of terrorism to center stage, distorting ... the significance of a single individual." At MESA's annual national conference held a year after 9/11, 550 papers were read; one dealt with terrorism, one dealt with fundamentalism (not Islamism), and the rest avoided the subject. Fortunately, said Joel Beinin of Stanford, MESA's president that year: he sarcastically dubbed the study of terrorism "terrology" and praised the members' "great wisdom" for dismissing it in their work. Juan Cole put in his two cents worth: "Asking MESA to hold panels on contemporary terrorism, is rather like asking literary scholars to comment on the resignation of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil." For the sources, click here.

(The buggy judgment, spelled out much later in this article on Pape? Relying on MESA and their leading scholarly members for illumination on the nature of radical Islamist fundamentalism and jihad terrorism would be more than a little like the pioneer engineers and scientists who built the first spacecraft to reach the moon in 1969 having drawn most of their insights into their challenges from the leading members of MFESA --- Miltants of the Flat-Earth Studies Association.)

Meanwhile, shift your attention and focus for the time being on . . .



  Dying To Win's Merits:

They're several really. Otherwise, why bother?

In shorthand terms, Pape's book ranges widely and is based on extensive, careful research. Its overall view of suicide terrorism relies at bottom on quantitative indicators of all such bombings and attacks that have occurred between 1980 and the end of 2003 . . . 315 terrorist incidents in all, 95% of which, according to Pape, have followed a clear, calculated strategic logic carried out by a total of 18 well-structured suicide-terrorist organizations --- all of which, it turns out, have had overwhelmingly secular nationalist aims. Tersely put, all 18 organized terrorist campaigns, says Pape, have been primarily motivated by hot-wire nationalist urges to politically coerce an alien occupying country --- without exception, democratic in all the campaigns --- and force it by means of drastic suicidal attacks on its military forces and civilians to withdraw from its national territory and allow the local people their independence and self-determination . . . the autonomy to structure their politics and society the way they want to without outside interference. He applies strategic logic in a coherent, consistent manner that jibes with its standard use in the study of coercive diplomacy (often called "compellence" in strategic jargon) --- rational, coolly calculated efforts that, in the case of suicide-terrorism since 1980, the 18 various suicide-terrorist organizations have undertaken in order to increase the costs of the occupation by the alien country so that, at some point, the costs clearly outweigh the benefits to the occupier's government.

That's well-done, this use of strategic logic . . . at any rate as far as it goes. What's more, Pape convincingly shows that the bursting explosion of suicide terrorism since 1980 --- after decades or more of lying dormant --- can be best understood in simple, straightforward terms: it works. The invading and occupying democratic countries' governments that have been coerced this way --- Israel in grappling with Palestinian terrorist organizations, the French and Americans in Lebanon after large casualties were inflicted on them by Hezbollah and others in the early 1990s, nd Sri Lanka's government in dealing with the Tamil Tigers suicide-bombings in the 1990s, Turkey in coming to terms with Kurdish rebels --- have, up to now, been forced into major concessions to the terrorist movements . . . usually full withdrawal, though sometimes something short of that.

 

The book's complex argument unfolds niftily in three systematically organized parts, all well-written and full of often stimulating points and information:

1) What the strategic logic of suicide terrorism amounts to --- rational, calculated attacks to politically coerce an opponent in the manner just mentioned.

2) What the social and organizational logic of the 18 suicide-terrorist movements amounts to --- nationalist struggles for national independence and self-determination, with religious influences decidedly secondary as a motivating-force in the coercive terrorist efforts. Specifically, the occupying country in 17 of the 18 organized suicide-terrorist campaigns has had a different religion, intensifying the local people's nationalist hatred of it.

3) The logic and motives of individual terrorist leaders and bombers, which amount to forms of clear altruistic behavior: of self-sacrifice and self-destruction in behalf of the national community's strivings after independence by sane, rational patriots.

In all three parts, Pape also sets out some closely reasoned analysis of specific terrorist movements among the 18 total organized campaigns of suicide-terrorism, trying at times to underpin that analysis with some fairly simple (if questionable) statistical evidence as well as qualitative case-study analysis There's also a fourth part really, a final chapter. In it Pape unfolds some policy advice to the Bush administration on how to fight the real nature of Al Qaeda and its offshoots that follow logically from his analysis of their motives and behavior. In his view, the military interventions in the Saudi peninsula early in the last decade, not to forget the military action that brought the US and its allies into Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, are all drastically wrong and misconceived.

But Note: It's A Flawed If Stimulting Book

The buggy judgment? Even if you disagree with Pape's overall argument and the viewpoint that informs it, you can't but come away from the book without a better understanding of why that wisdom is essentially sound in its basics . . . or so the buggy analysis that follows in parts two, three, and four will argue here.



It doesn't follow that everyone who holds that conventional, basically correct outlook on jihadist terrorism would agree with the Bush-Blair policy of occupying Afghanistan and Iraq militarily. Obviously, certain governments in NATO have disagreed with their Iraq policy since the start of the war to topple Saddam Hussein's brutal government in March 2003. Still, it does mean that Pape's book, for all its merits, amounts in the end to a whitewashing of radical Islamist movements, ideologies, and their connection to jihad terrorism. This isn't, mind you, just the opinion of prof bug. It happens to be the outlook on Islamist terrorism of the Al Qaeda sort that is shared by all the democratic governments in the West and elsewhere, including the small number of Muslim democracies: Turkey (a stable democratic ally in NATO) and the three new Muslim countries of Afghanistan and Iraq and Indonesia. Nor is that all. As the behavior of dozens of other, non-democratic Muslim governments reveals, they too share the democratic view that jihad terrorism and extremist Islam threaten their own countries's security . . . so much so that they are allied informally with the Western world in its conflicts with the Islamist jihadists.

Pape's Motives Here: Why Speculate? No Need To Question His Good Faith

Whether the desire to whitewash Islamist extremism and its connections to jihad terrorism was what originally prompted Pape's study of suicide-terrorism --- which were prefigured in an article that appeared in the American Political Science Review in 2003 --- is not clear. How could it be clear? Who can be sure what the motives are that prompt an intelligent, gifted scholar to undertake a lengthy research-project on a controversial front-burner topic of immense importance? Pape himself might not be fully conscious of all his motives.

After all, we all do things --- especially complicated things that require sustained effort --- for a variety of motives, some of which might even be in conflict with one another. And for what it's worth, Pape is not a pacifist or a left-wing activist who opposes the use of force. His last chapter makes that clear. He's a realist, a term in international relations theory that refers to someone who takes power-politics for granted and seeks to find ways through diplomacy, deterrence, and coercive diplomacy to manage the relations between armed states and groups. . . some of which conflicts will flare into open war or terrorist activities at times.

Enough said. Prof bug has no reason to question the boda-fides that underlie Professor Pape's argument.

That doesn't make his argument right. And whatever the intent and unconscious motives might have initiated his project and its results, it does end up not just wrong but, it seems, dangerously misleading . . . a whitewashing, to repeat, of a raw rippling threat from Islamist terrorists world-wide, many of whom, it also seems, wouldn't hesitate to use biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons against the US and its democratic allies if they thought they could get away with it.

One Last Point

A key question follows.

If Pape is right, how come all the major countries of the world with diplomatic and military clout --- not all allied with the US like India or China, and for that matter not democratic either such as authoritarian China or a deformed, semi-autocratic democracy like Russia --- have created an informal Concert of Great Powers, global in its reach, that the world has never experienced before and that is aimed at countering jihad terrorism, including the use of military force and coercive diplomacy?

Remember, these same countries have often been at diplomatic loggerheads in the recent past. Some like Russia, China, Germany, and France even opposed the US-led coalition to go to war and topple Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Come to that, some of them even seem to worry about the huge power balance in favor of the US as the world's lone superpower. And yet they all more or less work together in intelligence and otherwise to counter the global Islamist threat and the jihad terrorism that it supports. And so we ask again: how could anyone convinced by Pape's argument explain why it is that China, India, and Russia have allied with the US, West Europe, East Europe, and Japan --- along with dozens of Muslim countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia --- and see themselves locked in a common struggle against jihadist terrorism and the vicious, hateful core of its ideological driving-force? How could all these governments be wrong while Pape is right?

 

PART TWO:
PAPE'S ARGUMENT SUMMARIZED CAREFULLY IN TWO WAYS

(I) A Careful If Conventional Summary