10/24/14 – Robert A. Pape – The Scott Horton Show

Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, X-Key Score, Boundless Informant.
Hey y'all, Scott Warren here for offnow.org.
Now here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The offnow project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place.
In state after state, I've lost count, more than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
Our next guest on the show today, our final guest on the show today is Robert A. Pape.
He's a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
And he is the author of Dying to Win the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
And also the sequel to that is called Cutting the Fuse.
And he's at the airport.
So it's a little noisy, but that's all right.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me on.
It's very good to have you back on the show.
It's been a long time since we've spoken.
And now, so there's a reason I got you on, a particular timely newsworthy reason.
And then I got some overall questions about some other stuff, too.
But Glenn Greenwald has written the same thing he always writes whenever there's a terrorist attack in the West.
And that is that actions have consequences.
And only this time, Glenn Greenwald is now world famous and humongous.
And so the entire World Party has taken out after him, pretending that he is justifying terrorism and apologizing for it.
In the words of Jeffrey Goldberg on Twitter, Greenwald says Canada had it coming, which, of course, is not at all what he said.
But I'm sure you're used to being paraphrased incorrectly along those same lines, I think.
Yeah, I think that it's terribly important that we try to explain the actions of our opponents and our enemies.
When we try to explain the causes, the actual causes, as opposed to just name-calling, then it's easy for those who might disagree to say, oh, well, what that explanation is is somehow a moral defense.
But that's really far from the truth.
If we're going to actually undermine and defeat a threat, we need to understand what's causing it.
Otherwise, we could easily take actions that make it worse.
So it's just simply a mistake for those who disagree on the substance of what causes a threat to blame the other as somehow a moral accomplice.
This is basically just ugly politics.
It serves no one well, and it doesn't improve our security.
All right.
But here's the thing, though.
Value-free.
Obviously, we all universally condemn anyone killing civilians in any context or anything like that.
But you still, sir, are basically telling the American people you started it.
Not you deserve what happens to you because you started it.
Not that it's okay for the other side to attack civilians.
No, no, no.
But you started it.
That's really what you're telling them, and that is quite a tough pill to swallow, no?
It's a tough pill to swallow, but I just gave a talk yesterday to the Chicago FBI.
I've given numerous talks to elites in Washington on both sides of the aisle.
And the fact of the matter is when you get the cameras off and we sit down and we talk about the hard facts and the hard evidence, there's growing consensus about what is triggering and causing the threat.
It's not like we're in a world where we were 10, 12 years ago, that we are in a data vacuum where we just don't understand what's coming at us.
It's true.
In the general public, it's difficult to have a serious discussion of the facts in the general public.
But that's not really the case with elites behind closed doors.
And I think that this is probably most reflected in the strategy that President Obama is pursuing against ISIS.
So for over a decade, I and some others have been calling for a strategy to counter the threat of terrorism from the Persian Gulf called offshore balancing, which is to rely on over-the-horizon air, naval, and special forces and empowering local groups to undermine the threat.
Well, that is the strategy that Obama has followed.
That's the strategy that he articulated in his speech about a month ago.
And the strategy he's been pursuing against ISIS pretty much from the beginning.
And it is a strategy that will take several years to have real bite, but it reflects the fact that I think there's growing understanding of the facts of what's really driving the threat.
Right.
Now, there's a problem with that, though, and I think you're right about that, that he understands that putting in ground troops will be counterproductive over the long term.
On the other hand, it seems like nothing short of ground troops is actually going to get the job done of looking like they're even really degrading the Islamic State.
And that would be, I would think, a major step would be driving them out of power in Mosul, which, of course, would just turn them back into an insurgency anyway.
It wouldn't necessarily get rid of them at all.
They might turn and run at the first sight of the Marines rather than stand there and fight and turn back into an insurgency.
But who other than the Marines can do it?
Even with American air power backing them, can the so-called Iraqi army and Shiite militias take Mosul?
Probably not, right?
The real local group that matters are the Sunni tribes.
It is not going to be the case that we should bet that the Kurds are going to launch a major ground offensive to take large swaths of Sunni territory, because the Sunnis would fight hard for that territory, and then the Kurds would die in significant numbers, and they're not willing to do it, just as the Shia-dominated Iraqi army would not fight and die for Sunni areas.
That doesn't mean they won't fight and die for their own areas.
The Kurds are going to fight and die for their own areas.
The Shia will fight and die for their own areas.
But we shouldn't be asking the Kurds or the Shia or the Americans to go and die to take Sunni territory.
The groups that care are the Sunni tribes.
And the reason that ISIS is a bigger problem today than it was several years ago isn't simply because there's a couple thousand Islamic radicals or terrorists in Iraq.
It's because the Sunni tribe decided to ally with ISIS.
And they did so because, for the last several years, the Shia-backed government in Iraq in particular has been trying to suppress the Sunni tribe.
And so what Obama has done is try to change the politics of the situation first.
That's what he did in June, so that there is a much more inclusive government in Baghdad that's not trying to put their thumb on the Sunni tribe.
And now the next step is to start to build real working alliances with the tribes, which we've had in the past.
And I think that this is really the way forward.
And not just the way forward for Obama, but this is going to be the way forward for a Hillary Clinton administration, for a Republican administration.
If we're going to undermine and deal with ISIS, it's going to come through the Sunnis.
Well, now, I'm not for doing a thing.
I prefer complete non-intervention at this point, although I absolutely agree with you that it's the Sunni tribes who own this fight, and it's theirs to win.
And as we saw, as you say, in 2006 and 2007, the Al-Qaeda and Iraqis are such jerks.
Nobody will accept their rule.
It's just not legitimate rule.
It never can be.
They're a militia, and they're legitimate as a militia in certain circumstances.
But I think that really anything that we do to help the Sunni tribes or to help them ally with the Shia in Baghdad actually would be counterproductive.
We ought to just knock it off.
I do appreciate that this is a lot better than sending in the entire 3rd Infantry Division, the entire Marine Corps, like George Bush did.
To show you how broadly elites understand this, I was just at a public session with General John Abizaid, who used to be the CENTCOM commander.
And what I'm going to tell you, he said in public, so I'm not revealing a confidant, but he explained to this fairly large audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that he's in no way justifying why ISIS is getting ahead in the Sunni area, but he wanted them to understand why.
And he explained that when ISIS goes into a Sunni area, the first thing they do is get bulldozers out and clear the trash from the streets.
The second thing they do is they round up criminals that are stealing.
Now, yes, it's true they're using some brutal methods to punish the criminals, like cutting off a hand if they're stealing, but the fact is, as General Abizaid said, a local village or a local town that is basically facing huge problems because the Shia-backed government in Baghdad refuses to clear up the trash, refuses to deal with crime in the streets, well, this is what's creating the opportunity for ISIS in these Sunni areas.
And he is strongly in agreement that we need to start supporting the Sunni tribes to basically act as the natural alternative to ISIS.
All right, but now here's the thing, though.
What about the politics of when this doesn't work as well?
Because, you know, I've been talking with Patrick Coburn, who's the best journalist in the whole world on all of this stuff, who's been explaining the slow-motion train wreck with the rise of the Islamic State here for the past few years on the show, and he's talked at length about how they have learned the lesson of Zarqawi and company's failure from 2006 and 2007.
They've got some very powerful imams and tribal leaders and Baathist military officers basically being held hostage right now as, you know, ransom on their power or they're going to cut the heads off of these extremely prominent, valuable people to their local communities that they've got.
In other words, they are extremely wary of that awakening stab in the back they got last time, and they've really covered their bases pretty well this time, and they're a lot better armed and a lot better financed than before, and they may be the smallest, weakest little state in the world, but they're a hell of a lot bigger than al-Qaeda in Iraq ever was back when.
And so it may not be that easy, but then again, you know, too much American participation with those tribes, again, might just backfire and might drive more people into the hands of the Islamic State.
You're right.
Oh, and then, I'm sorry, the one more thing was, and also the calendar keeps going by, and there's presidential and other political politics about how long are we going to let Baghdadi claim Raqqa and Mosul as his capitals like this, you know?
So you're right.
If we try to turn the tribes into our little army that was basically run out of the White House to get them to do our bidding, then that's going to backfire.
But that's not what we did the last time we supported the tribes, and it's not what we should be doing now, and it's not the way forward.
It's important to remember that in fall 2006, AQI changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq.
That's where the first declaration of the Islamic State of Iraq came from.
And what happened is that that created a natural fissure between ISI and the tribes, and the reason is because that threatens the authority of tribal elders.
So the tribes are only supporting this group because there's a bigger threat from the Shia government.
Well, how did we deal with this before?
We paid the tribes $300 per person a month to just simply do one thing.
Don't kill us.
They could get guns with that.
They could defend themselves from the Shia government.
They could defend themselves from the terrorist group.
The main thing was they just shouldn't kill us.
Well, we need to return to that policy, and we need to return to a long-term commitment to that policy, as opposed to simply having a policy that's there, and then we turn it off.
And that's really the way forward.
It's not to turn the Sunni tribes into our little armies or our little tools.
It's to empower them that they become the future of Sunni politics.
All right.
Now, on the Syrian civil war, I've been meaning to ask you this for a couple of years now.
You're most famous, if I can sum it up, and I hope I won't oversimplify it so simple that it's not true anymore, but basically your thesis, as you've shown in your work, is that foreign occupation and the more different the civilization, the worse off you are, but foreign occupation is the single leading cause of suicide terrorism, particularly in the world.
And you've shown, obviously, like through the Tamil Tigers, that it's not necessarily wrapped up in Islam whatsoever and these kind of arguments.
But I wonder about how you categorize all the al-Nusra and Islamic State fighters, many of them Syrians, who have died and killed in suicide attacks in the Syrian civil war.
Are they under foreign occupation?
Yep.
There are two types of an occupation.
One, an external, where there's a foreign community that's traveling across the border, say the Americans into Afghanistan or the Americans into Iraq.
There's a second kind of occupation where there is an internal government from one community that is foreign to a minority in its own state.
That is, it's fundamentally different.
And that internal occupation is what characterized Sri Lanka, where there's a single state called Sri Lanka and the Sinhalese government, who are Buddhist, were occupying the Tamil Tigers that were Hindu.
That is an internal occupation.
It's not coming from afar, it's happening internally, and you're getting suicide terrorism under the same basic conditions, whether it's an internal occupation or an external occupation.
So it doesn't matter if they're from the adjacent territory right there next door to you, it's the difference in the culture, in the society and the beliefs.
It's the difference in the culture.
And in the case of Syria, you have an Alawite government, which is Shia, occupying the Sunnis.
And in the case of Iraq now, you have a Shia government in Baghdad occupying the Sunnis.
So who's doing the suicide attack?
They're the Sunnis.
That's what's happening, and it's because of the religious, it's because of the difference, the social distance, and it's because these two different communities are very far apart when it comes to ways of life.
But now, what about all the kooks from Libya and Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East who travel to Syria, even including Americans who travel to Syria and then become suicide bombers?
You're right.
They are not national.
They're not internal.
They are transnational, and in the studies where we can truly count, it turns out that somewhere between 10% and a third of the fighters that are fighting against an occupation are not coming from internally to the country.
They're coming transnational from outside.
But they, too, even though they're transnational, are motivated by the motive to defend the local minority against the occupation.
What's driving them?
A good example, let's just pick ISIS.
Some of your listeners may be able to go to YouTube, and there probably still is the ISIS video of the Canadian from June 2014.
This is about a 10-minute video, and if people haven't watched it, they should watch it, because you'll see that there's a Canadian who leaves Canada and goes to Syria, and he goes to Syria to die to defend the Sunnis, who he believes are under Shia occupation from the Alawite government.
So it's true, he's coming from Canada, but it's also the same motive.
Another important example here, of course, is the 9-11 hijackers.
I guess many of them were from Egypt, and one was from Yemen, one was Lebanese.
What about them?
Are they an aberration?
19 hijackers caused 9-11.
15 of them came from Saudi Arabia, one from the UAE.
So those 16 in the Arabian Peninsula, which includes Saudi Arabia and the UAE, had enormous American military presence at the time.
And the 9-11 hijackers from Saudi Arabia made martyr videos, and they're martyr videos, which I'm afraid your audience won't be able to find on YouTube.
I do have these, and I show them when I give my public talks, but they are not readily available.
But their martyr videos lay out that they are doing 9-11 because of the occupation of the Arabian Peninsula by the American military, which they see as distorting their way of life.
It's true, there were three.
Muhammad Atta was an Egyptian.
There are not every single one of the 9-11 hijackers that was from Saudi Arabia, but the overwhelming majority were.
And so what I would say is that it's a pretty close fit.
Well, and by the way, and I didn't really sum this up for people very well in the introduction.
I should have.
Again, everybody, this is Robert A. Pape from the University of Chicago, and he studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980.
So when he says, you know, the dad of this and the dad of that, he means all of it.
No, really, all of it.
He's done that work with the help of his students, I'm sure.
And now, so same thing for the, is it just the exact same kind of a logic going on with the Canadian attackers apparently in the last week here?
Well, if you look, it looks like the individual who did the attack in Ottawa is doing it precisely because the Canadian government denied his passport application to go to Syria to fight for ISIS.
So the more that we are learning about what happened in the Ottawa attack, the more it is about an individual wanting to go to defend the community in Syria that he believes is under great threat.
And the Canadians were simply denying him the opportunity to do that by preventing his passport application from going forward.
It will take, so when I study suicide attacks, I'm not just studying them the moment they occur.
I collect with my research team information about every suicide attack that has occurred since the early 1980s, even long after they've occurred.
Sometimes the best information comes a week or two afterwards when we get much more clarity about the motive.
And what we're seeing with the Canadian cases, as time goes on, we are getting deeper understanding of the motive, and it is fitting this pattern of an individual wanting desperately to fight for a community he sees as under threat.
And did you see here, maybe you can verify this even, it's reported in the Globe and Mail that the shooter's father in the second attack fought on America and the west side in the war in Libya in 2011.
I can't really verify, I cannot verify that.
So I'm not able to confirm that at the moment.
So what we do at the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism is we have an online database, which your listeners can go to, and it's free, and it's up-to-date within a month.
So it's not up-to-date to this day, but we usually need a month to try to get most of the evidence on the attack that occurred in the past 30 days.
And what's the site again, Bob?
It's the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism.
It has the best data in the world on suicide attacks.
The government uses this database.
It's very – and you'll see that when your listeners go to the database, they don't just search a database and get data.
They can keep drilling down under the, quote, view source, and they'll be able to get the actual textual information, verifying all the information.
So Scott, when you asked me, can we verify X or verify Y, we don't just assert it.
We put the actual verified textual references in complete text on the web for free, so that you don't have to just trust me about what I'm saying.
But we're about one month always out of date because it takes about a month to really let the dust settle, so to speak.
Otherwise, we'd be changing the database every day.
Right.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
And also you're doing the kind of in-depth work that it's better that you take your time.
And we have a research team that what we're doing is collecting corroborated.
So when you say, well, we have rules for what counts as independent sources.
So every bit of data requires a minimum of two independent sources.
And, again, your listeners could actually go to the website, and there's a nine-page manual that explains in detail how we go about this, which is why it's become the go-to place for really tracking suicide attacks.
And one more thing here real quick, and I'm sorry we're going to go a little bit over time here, but one last question if you have a moment.
There was a guy named Dan Dresner who got in an argument with Greenwald.
He did not mischaracterize what Greenwald wrote as any kind of apology, but he still criticized him only fairly.
But what he said was something along the lines of, well, what about the democracies?
How come they attack us but they don't attack Iran and they don't attack China?
It must be because they hate what's good about us, that kind of thing.
And I was wondering if you could speak to that, why terrorists don't bother attacking China.
And for that matter, why don't the bin Ladenites attack Iran all day?
Yeah.
So, first of all, what Dan Dresner is saying is generally true.
That is that especially suicide terrorism has been directed against states that hold elections.
Some of those elections are not as free and fair as others, but many of them hold meaningful elections.
And the reason is because suicide attacks are increasing costs, and they're trying to get governments to change their policy by increasing costs.
And some of the most brutal dictatorships in the world aren't sensitive to cost.
Like Saddam Hussein would not have been sensitive to cost.
However, what's been happening in the last few years, and this is true in Iran, and this is even true in China, and it's certainly true in Syria, is that suicide terrorism is happening more and more in what you might think of as the more moderate authoritarian regime.
Not the most brutal regime.
Again, I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein's regime would have been susceptible to this.
But if you go to the CFO's database, you'll be able to track the increasing number of suicide attacks in Iran, in China, and of course in Syria.
And I've been to China eight times in the last few years talking about terrorism rising in China.
And there have been a handful of suicide attacks.
And it is, in fact, creating an enormous public pressure on the government because the public is afraid, and the government is starting to respond, giving the Uyghurs basically more confessions.
So, in other words, the degree to which they're responsive is the degree to which the terrorists bother butting their head up against the brick wall there.
That's exactly right.
These are groups that are trying to get confessions from governments that have very few alternative means.
So that doesn't mean they're always going to get their maximum demands.
It doesn't mean they'll even get any demands all the time.
But if they can get demands a third of the time, progress further demands, say, a quarter of the time, a third of the time, that encourages them to keep trying.
And that's what you're seeing in Iran.
But especially, I would just say, look at the data set, the database that I'm talking about, the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, and just see the increasing number in the last few years of suicide attacks in China and Iran.
All right, well, with that, I will let you go and catch your flight.
But I sure do appreciate your time on this layover, Robert.
I'm glad we were able to do it.
Thanks so much for having me on, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
That's Robert A. Pape, everybody.
He's a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
And, yeah, this Web address is kind of too complicated for you to memorize, but just Google up the suicide attack database, the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism.
And the books are, what is it?
The first one is Dying to Win, the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
And then the second one is Cutting the Fuse.
And we'll be right back.
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