All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Robert A.
Pape.
He's a professor at the University of Chicago, director of their project on security and terrorism and co-author of Cutting the Fuse, the Global Explosion of Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
The previous book was Dying to Win the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, which, again, I urge you to if you don't run out to the bookstore and go read it, please at least go look at the Wikipedia entry, which is very long and detailed and explanatory.
And you will learn things from it.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So this book, Dying to Win, came out about 2005, I think, right?
That's right.
And that was the first time we spoke.
And I think that interview started with your explanation that after September 11th, you went and cracked open a Koran to try to figure out how we got into this mess.
And that's what led you into this entire project studying suicide terrorism.
So tell us.
That's exactly right, Scott.
What is it about Islam that makes people blow themselves up so much?
Well, I, like most of the people who are going to be listening, began by thinking that Islam was the root of the problem.
In fact, I thought what I was going to do is study suicide terrorism to try to figure out why people who become devout Muslims end up becoming radicalized, which is what most people think is the root of what we face.
And what I ended up discovering was something completely different.
You see, I began to approach the study of suicide terrorism a lot the way a medical researcher would approach lung cancer.
Why is that?
It's because suicide terrorism is the lung cancer of terrorism.
It's the biggest killer in the category.
The average suicide attack kills 12 times as many as the average ordinary terrorist attack.
And without the element of suicide, the terrorists on 9-11 could never have killed 3000 people.
And we know that because in 1993, there was an ordinary terrorist attack against the very same World Trade Centers that killed six people, which actually most people don't even remember.
And we certainly didn't turn our country upside down over it.
What we've been turning our foreign policy and country upside down over is the threat of suicide terrorism.
That's the biggest problem that we face.
And I began to collect statistics and it turned out I was the one to compile the first complete database of all suicide attacks around the world.
It starts, the phenomenon starts in the early 1980s.
That's when the modern phenomenon really begins.
And when you collect this information a lot the way a medical researcher studies lung cancer, you can start to see the root cause.
It just jumps right out.
You see, smoking, of course, is now the root cause of the trigger of lung cancer.
And the smoking of suicide terrorism is foreign occupation.
That is, over 95 percent of all suicide attacks around the world since 1980 have in common not a religion and not even just Islam, but a specific circumstance, which is foreign occupation.
And this is quite similar to lung cancer.
Of the people who get lung cancer, 85 percent have smoked.
Of the suicide terrorist attacks we've witnessed since 1980, over 95 percent are directly in response to a foreign occupation, which is why the more we've poured troops into Afghanistan, the worse things have gotten.
The more we've pulled troops out of Iraq, the better things have gotten.
Well, I bet probably if we mount a giant land invasion to help the people of Libya fight Muammar Gaddafi, who our government was backing up to, you know, two and a half weeks ago, then that'll probably do real good for the future of suicide terrorism, especially taking into account how many Libyans traveled to Iraq just to be suicide bombers during the worst of the civil war there a few years ago.
That's exactly right.
You've got it exactly right, Scott.
This is why this lesson is so crucial.
Just look at what's happened in Tunisia and Egypt.
We've had wonderful revolutions without stationing a single combat soldier there.
There's no fly.
There's not a no fly zone over Egypt.
There's not a no fly zone over Tunisia.
And what's happened?
We've had democracy move in the direction that we all would hope without militarizing the problem.
In Libya, we have the opposite danger here.
Yes, there's absolutely no doubt that Gaddafi is being brutal toward his population.
And there are steps that we can take.
I don't mean to say that we have to just sit by and watch the murder of innocent people.
But the exact wrong thing to do would be to militarize the problem, because that would actually end up solidifying support inside of Libya for Gaddafi and make it harder for the rebels to succeed.
How do we know that?
That's what happened with Saddam in the 1990s.
Well-meaning people, both Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s, thought, oh, the way to get rid of this evil dictator Saddam is with no fly zones.
Well, we actually had those in the country for 10 years, Scott.
And what happened?
It only congealed Saddam's hold on power.
How could that possibly be?
It's because when you have a foreign military presence, even one that says it's well-meaning, what happens from the local population's perspective?
They get scared.
They get scared because they see, oh, this is a country where there's oil.
So there's an ulterior motive here.
And once they suspect those ulterior motives, they side with the existing government, as awful as it is, at least many of them do, and makes it almost impossible to bring that country real democratic change.
There are alternatives, but the military is not one of them.
Well, and by the way, you're the professor.
How many Libyans did travel to Iraq to be suicide bombers?
Do you know?
Yeah, we think that it's probably about 100 or 120.
It's a little difficult to know with great precision, but it's somewhere around that number.
Altogether, there were approximately 1,300 individual suicide attackers in Iraq.
Of that number, the largest number were Iraqi Sunnis, and then the vast majority came from either Iraq or the immediately adjacent border communities.
That is Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and Syria.
If you look at that group, that is the regional group, they make up 82 percent of the suicide attackers in Iraq, that is Iraq and the surrounding region.
And then a smaller fraction, somewhere around 15 percent, came from outside of the Arabian Peninsula.
And a big hunk of those came from Libya.
And as you identified, many were complaining that it's the West's support of this regime, the Qaddafi regime, basically by buying its oil, that that was what led Qaddafi to have the money to suppress its people.
And so that's in part why they were so angry at America's extension of its presence in Iraq.
Well, and I don't know if the people of Libya know this, but it's been in the press, I guess, especially the British press, about the Americans and the Brits working together to actually sell them weapons over the past few years since they brought Qaddafi back in from the cold in 2003.
That's that's right.
One of the things that we're that the press is now really training for his soul training.
That's exactly right.
And one of the things that the press is now catching up with is that in Tunisia, Egypt and even Libya, America's and the West's relationship to these countries has been keeping in power repressive regimes.
You see, much of the public is kind of confused.
Why would it be the case that people in northern Africa would be so anti-American?
And it's very easy to think, oh, well, there must be just Muslims who just somehow hate America.
No, there's a real problem up until recently in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, which is that the relationship to the West has been providing the military and financial wherewithal to suppress their populations.
And that has simply angered those populations, which is now why they want to throw off that those repressive regimes.
And it's why the White House wants to pretend so bad that we're on the side of the people there, too.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It's Bob Pape, everybody from the University of Chicago.
We'll be right back.
All right, welcome back to the show, anti-war radio.
We're talking with Robert A.
Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, author of Dying to Win and co-author of Cutting the Fuse, the Global Explosion of Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
And now, you know, here's the thing.
It makes sense what you say that, you know, it's suicide bombing is a tactic used by people whose land is occupied by foreigners and that kind of thing.
But it's got to be something about Islamic extremism because, you know, like TV says over and over again, because just think of how extreme that is, strapping a bomb to yourself.
That's all because of virgins in heaven that you get promised later and martyrdom.
And I read it on World Net Daily.
These Islamic extremists, they're some real dangerous folk.
I know that sounds so so compelling.
But the fact of the matter is there are many, many hundreds of purely secular suicide terrorists that are not Islamic extremists.
For many decades, the world leader in suicide terrorism was the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist group, a secular group, a Hindu group.
They actually, in terms of number, were only dwarfed by the Iraqis, the suicide terrorism in Iraq, simply because of numbers.
The Tamils were just simply a population of about a million people compared to the 55 million people who live in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula overall.
So if we occupy a much larger area and that area is Muslim, then that's going to provoke a large amount of Muslim suicide terrorism.
So the reason we hear so much about Muslim suicide terrorism is because we're occupying Muslim countries.
Notice how we're not occupying Hindu countries.
We're not occupying other Christian countries.
It really is the case that since really not even 9-11, it goes back to 1990.
What essentially happened, Scott, is that before 1990, the United States had very little military presence in Muslim countries, and in fact, we weren't really stationing large amounts of ground forces all around the world.
Why?
The Soviet Union was blocking that.
Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and on top of that, Saddam invaded Kuwait.
And those two events together produced a sea change in America's foreign policy to the Middle East.
For many decades, the United States had never stationed a single combat soldier on the Arabian Peninsula.
We stationed a huge army there in 1990 to kick Saddam out of Kuwait.
We kicked him out of Kuwait in March 1991 and never left.
Every day since March 1991, we had between 12,000 and 30,000 combat soldiers stationed on the Arabian Peninsula in the 1990s.
And now, of course, much more than that.
And that is the real root cause of the problems that we faced, because increasingly from 1991 on, terrorist leaders like bin Laden were able to whip up anger against America because they were making the argument, look, why are they staying there if not to steal all of our oil?
All right, now here's the thing, though.
We do have troops occupying Western countries.
We've had troops in Germany since the end of World War Two, troops in Italy since the end of World War Two, troops in Britain since the end of World War Two, right?
Since before then.
And but, you know, in your book, the first book, I haven't read the second one yet, but in the first book, Dying to Win, you kind of compare and contrast Sri Lanka, which you just talked about, with Sudan, where there's massive atrocities and half a million people killed in the space of a couple of years.
And everybody's a Sunni Arab and nobody does suicide bombing there.
And that's where you get to what Islam does have to do with it, is the difference between the occupiers and the occupiers.
I'm really glad that we get a deeper conversation with you, Scott, because sometimes I don't really get to do that on our media shows because you're exactly right, that the core issue is that not every occupation will escalate to suicide terrorism.
And the reason is because of the social distance between the occupier and the local community.
When there's especially a religious difference between the foreign occupier and the local community, whatever that difference is, whether it's Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Muslim, whether it's Buddhist, Hindu, as it is in the case of the Tamil Tigers.
And even if the suicide terrorism is purely secular, when there's a religious difference, it enables the terrorist leader to demonize the occupier in the worst possible terms, as motivated the occupier by a religious agenda.
This is why Bin Laden never fails to miss an opportunity to paint the United States as a Christian crusader, where he means that we're a Christian country pursuing a Christian agenda to convert Muslims to Christianity, to make it the case that Christians will take the minerals and other resources of Muslims, or to help Israel extend its control over Jerusalem so both Christians and Jews can control Jerusalem into the future.
And this particular argument by Bin Laden is incredibly powerful because it scares the local communities, whether they're religious or not.
And it's also something that we have inadvertently often fed into.
So George Bush, when he was president, he often talked about following the Bible for guidance in foreign policy.
This was fitting right into Bin Laden.
He took great advantage of the fact that Bush himself admitted that he looked to the Bible for his guidance in foreign policy.
And this is something Bin Laden had been arguing about America for years.
This is what scares the bejesus out of folks on the Arabian Peninsula about our military presence there.
I know.
Well, and just look about the shoe on the other foot thing here.
We got people I'm sure you saw this footage of the city councilwoman and I guess the talk radio audience down there in Orange County protesting the this Muslim group raising money for a battered woman's shelter.
Americans are that frightened of civilian women and children living in their neighborhoods as some kind of foreign occupying force.
If they wear a little scarf on their head, what if they actually had a caliphate with a giant imperial army that was occupying North America?
Think those Orange County lunatics wouldn't be sending their sons to go blow themselves up.
They'd be the first in line.
I think that there is no doubt that many people in the United States would fight to the war, to the extremes they had to.
They wouldn't like it, but they'd fight to the extremes.
They had to to throw off a foreign military presence, especially if it were of a different religion.
And that's true, whether it's a Muslim occupation that we would be facing or a Chinese occupation.
If we were to imagine for a moment that China were to begin to station troops in Texas, even if the Obama administration signed an agreement with China saying, oh, that's great.
We want you to station an army of 50,000 in Texas.
I think you would see a violent uprise among ordinary Americans against that military presence, thinking that this would distort our way of life.
And you would see really extreme actions, possibly even suicide attack, to throw that Chinese army out if that was the only way to get rid of them.
Well, I got to tell you, Professor Pape, your social science sure does seem to prove my intuition right.
Well, and also what I read from, say, for example, Bin Laden's fatwas where he says, get out of the Arabian Peninsula or I'll kill you.
But it seems like we the argument is still not being won.
And that's mostly because the political class in this country can't admit that the American government started this fight.
You know, these are our friends, the old Mujahideen.
And as you know, there's just no question about it's just the truth.
The fact that it's not the widespread agreed narrative or whatever is the problem.
It was the occupation of Saudi Arabia from which to put a blockade and a no fly zone bombing and all that on Iraq that got us into this mess.
And they had to lie to us and say, well, they did it because they hate us because we're good.
But why would they hate us?
Because they're good.
Unless that's what's built into their sick, satanic religion.
And that's what we've been fighting ever since, is that that's what the American people believe.
They if they hate us because we're good, it can only be because they're evil.
A billion of them.
And we got to stop them.
Well, Scott, you're right.
We haven't won the argument yet, but we're making substantial progress in the last six months.
I've been on Capitol Hill numerous times.
In fact, last October, I had an all day conference on Capitol Hill where over 300 people came to the conference, was introduced by a congressman, Congressman Brian Baird.
We had the heads of the 9-11 Commission there, Governor Kaine, and also Admiral Gary Roughead.
He's the chief of naval operations, the number one officer in the Navy, came to speak endorsing the policy that comes out of our book called offshore balancing.
And I'm, in fact, going again to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, where a donor has purchased a thousand copies of Cutting the Fuse to give to every member of Congress.
And this is being organized out of Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey's office to distribute the books and and have another public session on Capitol Hill.
So it's true that we haven't really won the argument yet, but we're making great headway.
And the reason is because of the data and the information in the books and what the public could do that would be just amazingly helpful is help us by helping to spread the word.
And what do I mean by that?
I mean, getting a copy of the book and giving it to a skeptic.
I don't mean getting a copy of the book.
If you yourself already agree with this position, OK, that's great.
But what we have now is the opportunity to make more progress.
And the data is just incredibly powerful to any person who's got a reasonable mind.
And what you're seeing is bit by bit by bit, folks in mainstream Washington are paying attention.
Yeah, well, and I guess part of that is because it's been so many years since September 11th.
Finally, people's heads have cooled off a little bit.
They're willing to listen.
But I wonder what happens after the next something catches on fire.
That's why we want to do it.
That's why public education needs to happen now.
That's why it's so important to actually spread the word and the information about the data.
That's why if we just simply wait until another terrible event happens, when we're again so emotional, so angry and so fearful where we can't pay attention to information, this would be like waiting until you actually have lung cancer to begin to think about the data on smoking.
It's just too late.
Now's the time to begin to get that information out.
And by the way, it took two decades before we personally before the public was persuaded that smoking caused lung cancer.
We started to think about this in the 1940s.
It wasn't until the 1960s our politicians took steps to curtail smoking.
Why?
Because the public attitude had to come first.
That's why public education here is just so important.
And it really is just about the data.
And that's why I encourage folks to really help us.
All right, everybody, that is Robert A.
Pate, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, author of Dying to Win and co-author of Cutting the Fuse.
You can also find at least one article here at foreign policy dot com.
It's the occupation.
Stupid.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you, Scott.
