All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, KAOS959.com.
And for the last couple of weeks here, we've been going over Ron Paul's reading list.
We've talked with Chalmers Johnson, we've talked with Michael Schoyer.
I'm not going to bother with the 9-11 Commission report, but last on the list that Ron Paul gave Rudy Giuliani to read was Dying to Win the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
It's by my next guest, Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Great pleasure to be here.
Well, it's good to have you here, and now you know that Ron Paul has cited you as providing evidence for his position.
Do you agree with him?
Well, on Iraq, I certainly do.
I think that I'm really quite delighted that Dr. Paul has really delved in deeply into the subject.
And you might want to know that actually for about the last year and a half since my book has come out, Paul has invited me up to Capitol Hill, he's given speeches on the House floor about the book, and he has just, in fact, just about a week and a half ago he called me up for an hour to just go over some of the latest research that I've been collecting.
And the fact is, Paul is just quite interested in the facts.
And I have to say, this is an instance of a politician who is also being obviously fairly courageous since he's running, the facts tend to run against the foreign policy that the Bush administration has been pursuing, and as a Republican, nonetheless, Paul is looking very, very hard at the actual facts of the matter.
And now, the argument he made was that American foreign policy was a significant contributing factor to the attacks of September 11th.
You agree with that specifically?
Yes, I think that the facts are that over the last few years I've collected the first complete database of every suicide terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004, and then I've just recently, in the last few months, updated that database for the case of Iraq and also the rest of the world through the end of 2006.
If we focus just on Al-Qaeda, that is, just on the suicide attackers for Al-Qaeda, and this research is the first to collect the complete set of the 71 individuals who actually carried out attacks for Osama from when they began in 1995 to 2004.
Of those 71 individuals, two-thirds come directly from Sunni Muslim countries where the United States has stationed combat forces, and in fact, and this, of course, is not just the 19 hijackers who were involved with 9-11, 15 of them came from Saudi Arabia, but many, many more have come directly from the Persian Gulf that have been attacking American targets even in addition to 9-11.
And the fact is, if we look at Sunni countries and we ask the question, what are the odds that a suicide terrorist would emerge from a Sunni country to do a suicide attack for Osama, suicide attackers for Al-Qaeda are more than 10 times more likely to come from a Sunni country with American combat forces than a Sunni country without American combat forces.
And I'm afraid that this leads to a conclusion that's fairly hard for some people to hear, but what this means is that the presence of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula probably increased the risk of suicide attacks by Al-Qaeda, including 9-11, over 10 times.
Now, this does not mean that we should blame ourselves for the deaths of our civilians on 9-11.
Suicide terrorism is murder, and there's nothing that our combat forces did when they were stationed on the Arabian Peninsula that would justify the murder of our civilians.
But nonetheless, we should not overlook that what recruits suicide attackers for Osama better than anything else, his best mobilization appeal is the presence of American and Western combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.
Okay, and that really nails it down right there, because if we accept the war party's assertions about bin Laden and Zawahiri, these guys are pure evil.
They have a satanic religion, an ideology of death and destruction and nihilism and hatred for everything good, true, and beautiful, and you could never say anything to describe them or their personalities besides that.
They're pure evil.
Now the question is, why does anyone follow them?
That's exactly right.
You see, I don't doubt for a moment that the leaders of Al-Qaeda might have their own personal and maybe even evil reasons for wanting to attack America.
That's not really what matters so much here.
What matters is how Al-Qaeda can recruit suicide attackers to kill us.
You see, suicide terrorists for Al-Qaeda and just in general are walk-in volunteers.
They're not long-time members of the organization.
This is true all around the world, and it's also true for Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda does not cook up suicide attackers in a madrasa like Frankenstein monsters, so to speak.
They actually are walk-ins who basically walk in and sometimes little groups will self-organize and walk in to try to find and hook up with Al-Qaeda leaders.
But the fact is, it's more of a bottom-up phenomenon as it is generally speaking.
What that means is that what really matters is what are those circumstances which make it the case that those volunteers actually come forward.
What the data shows is that there's one circumstance which is head and shoulders above others.
It's when there is foreign combat forces on territory that the terrorists prize.
That is not the only risk factor, but it accounts for 95% of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world since 1980.
Not quite everyone, but 95%.
And you say in your book, Dying to Win, that you began this study with the assumption that this is about Islam.
Exactly right.
I have been a long-time scholar of national security affairs for a long time.
Before 9-11, I spent about 15 years studying the limits and possibilities of coercive air power.
I've actually spent three years teaching for the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s, and I got started on this on 9-11 itself when I was brought on a lot of media shows, talk shows, to answer questions about casualties.
You might remember that on 9-11 itself, there was a large question, were 20,000 dead, 1,000 dead?
Well, my experience with air power allowed me to be able to explain that, in fact, there's a fairly straightforward way to estimate casualties when a missile hits a building.
That is that there's a fire on the floor where the missile hits, and people below that point are commonly assumed to get out, and above that, not, which would then lead to a casualty estimate of 3,000 to 7,000 dead on 9-11.
Well, in the course of those discussions, I was also asked lots of questions about suicide terrorism, and of course, I found myself, like most people, jumping to the conclusion that Islam, or at least Islamic fundamentalism, must have something to do with it.
But the fact is, I also realized that these questions were hard to answer because our data was so thin and partial, and that's what led me to go about this project of collecting what became the first complete database of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world.
When I first published the first version of this as an academic article, I knew that no academic or think tank had such a database.
I was somewhat surprised in 2003, when I was contacted by our Department of Defense, and I discovered that, in fact, Britain and the United States and other countries around the world had been tracking ordinary terrorism going back decades, starting in the mid-'70s, but that we hadn't begun to track suicide terrorism until 2000.
And so, as a result, they were quite eager to get the data, which I gave them.
And in fact, even despite some of the conclusions of the study, the Defense Department has been one of the funders of the update and expansion of the database, which is the basis for dying to win.
Hm.
Well, that must have been the brass.
Don't tell the politicians.
Well, it's really quite a thing.
It's important to see that there are a lot of folks in government, and this is also true on Capitol Hill.
I've been on Capitol Hill four times.
I've talked to probably 40 of our 535 senators and representatives.
I've been in a lot of government circles, briefings to the CIA, FBI, in fact, I'm going to brief the FBI again on Monday in Cleveland.
The NSA, just a month and a half ago, the 3rd Infantry Division that was heading off to Baghdad, they asked me to come and give their officers a briefing on the causes of suicide terrorism just two weeks before they went to Baghdad.
And the fact is, although some of the conclusions from the patterns of suicide terrorism around the world can be startling and obviously politically controversial, the folks who are really trying to come to grips with this, including the 3rd Infantry Division going to Baghdad as part of the surge, they find that they really need to know the facts.
And it's important, because if they're going to go into a conflict and if their presence is one of the very likely causes of suicide terrorism, they need to know a fair bit about that and don't want to be sticking their heads in the political sand here because that's one way to lose your head.
Now, has terrorism expert Rudolph Giuliani called you for one of these briefings?
I'm afraid.
No, that hasn't happened and I'm not quite expecting it.
I have to say, I was really a bit surprised, even when Ron Paul decided to push this so far forward, because I knew that Paul knew a lot about the facts of the matter.
And I want to say, Republicans aren't the only one.
In the summer of 2005, Bill Clinton was kind enough to put my book on his top 5 for his summer reading.
Oh, really?
And that was really quite an honor as well.
So I don't want to paint this as either a Republican or a Democratic issue.
I think that this is more an issue of there are some politicians, and we can sort of tell by the politician, who are really interested in getting to the facts of the matter, which means sometimes going outside of Washington and looking to see what kind of research is being done independently of what's happening inside of Washington.
And Bill Clinton and Ron Paul are politicians who do that, and they seem to do that on a lot of issues.
I'd really like to see Bill Clinton's blurb.
It's all my fault.
I left the troops in Saudi Arabia for eight years and I got 3,000 American civilians killed on 9-11.
Read this book.
Well, I don't remember him saying that.
But I do think that it's important that, at least my experience in the last 18 months, when the cameras are not on, it's a very different sort of reception.
And this is true in the United States.
Six months ago I went to Australia for two weeks, and there I not only did things in the media, but also ended up going to their houses of parliament and giving briefings to their defense and intelligence committees.
These are some of the most senior politicians in Australia.
And the fact of the matter is, when at least the cameras are not on, I'm often really quite pleased to see the seriousness with which elected officials and other folks in government really come to grapple with the actual facts of the matter.
And I was really delighted to see that Paul was willing to put this forward in a very public way, right in the center of the Republican presidential debate.
And I think it's terribly helpful to have the debate focus on some of the core issues here we're going to have to wrestle with as a country.
Now tell me, why did you focus on suicide terrorism rather than just blowing up bombs in general or what have you?
Well, the reason is because 9-11, the deaths of 3,000 really could not have been caused without suicide attack.
We had an ordinary terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in 1993 against the very same towers.
In fact, a lot of folks might either not know or have forgotten that in 1993, Ramsey Youssef put a truck bomb in the garage of one of the towers and tried to bring down an entire tower.
The bomb went off, but it only ended up killing six people.
And what made 9-11 so deadly, what made it possible to kill 3,000 was really the willingness of the 19 to kill themselves in order to kill us.
And that meant that it was really important to focus rather concretely, like a bit of a laser, on suicide terrorism.
Now, obviously, I'm not making the case that the causes of suicide terrorism are the same as the causes of all terrorism.
Someday, I think of this a bit like cancer, you see, someday we may be able to find the cause of all cancer, but the fact is that's probably 40 or 50 years away even at best.
And in the meantime, it really is quite helpful to see that there's lung cancer, there's lymphomas, there's a whole variety of different kinds of cancers that are discrete.
And if we can study them as discrete phenomenon, we can actually learn a fair bit about their risk factors.
So with lung cancer, obviously, smoking is head and shoulders the main risk factor, and with terrorism, and especially suicide terrorism, that's a fairly discrete form of the phenomenon.
And one factor, one risk factor, the presence of foreign combat troops on territory of the terrorist prize is just head and shoulders above the others as the main driver of suicide terrorism.
And now, how is this supposed to work, the strategic logic of suicide terrorism?
The action is in the reaction, right?
That's exactly right.
You see, the core purpose of a suicide attack is not to die.
That's actually the easy thing to do.
The core purpose of a suicide attack is to kill, and to kill a large number in the target audience, or to cause so many deaths in such a public way that the target audience will put pressure on their society in order to cause the government to change its policy and remove the foreign combat troops that are at issue.
And so a good example of this was the Madrid attack in March 2004.
You see, we actually have an Al Qaeda strategy document for the Madrid, calling for attacks against Spain.
In the fall of 2003, Al Qaeda published a 42-page strategy document on radical websites calling for attacks directly against Spain in Madrid in March 2004 that would kill a large number of people and, they hoped, cause pressure right before an election that would either lead to the change of government, which actually happened, or enough pressure on the government that Spanish forces would just be yanked out of Iraq.
And that logic of trying to take an action which has a coercive effect, a political effect, in order to cause the government to pull out those combat forces is, in fact, the core reason why terrorist groups are moving towards suicide attack.
And you say that this is also, these are always directed against democracies.
I think the last time we spoke a couple of years ago, you said that, well, in China they have problems with Muslim extremists, etc., but they don't bother with suicide bombings in China because it won't push the Politburo.
The Politburo really couldn't care less, whereas in the West, a democracy can be mobilized to react pretty quickly.
That's exactly right, and so what we're seeing are suicide campaigns against American forces, against Israeli forces, there have been against French forces.
We're also seeing them in Sri Lanka.
We're seeing them in Kashmir against India's military control of Kashmir.
And you see, what's happening in a democracy is that it's really possible, because of our electoral politics, for publics to put pressure on their governments, whereas that's, of course, much less true with authoritarian states.
And one of the starkest examples of this is probably the PKK, which is a Kurdish terrorist group that has used suicide terrorism against Turkey, Turkey which has held free and fair elections since the early 1980s.
Well, the PKK used suicide terrorism against the Turkish government in the 1990s in order to try to compel the Turkish army, which was occupying the Kurdish areas of Turkey, to kind of pull back or grant some more autonomy for the Kurdish areas.
Well, just a few miles away in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was far more brutal toward Iraq's Kurds.
He was exterminating them, and neither the PKK nor any other terrorist group ever thought to use suicide terrorism against Saddam.
And knowing more about the strategic logic helps us to see why.
Who would ever think killing hundreds or even thousands of Iraqi civilians would have ever caused Saddam to change his mind about anything?
Right.
Yeah, nobody.
Well, so you also point out in your book that the race, the religion, the language difference, the distance that the foreign occupying army has come to do the occupying all have a lot of effect, too.
And I guess we can see that just putting the shoe on the other foot.
The reason Americans are so freaked out is because these are strange looking people with strange names and funny languages and funny religions.
That's why we're so scared of them.
Seems like they're kind of the same thing applies there when you have white Christians from Texas and Alabama occupying Arab land.
That's exactly right.
Not every foreign occupation by a democracy escalates to suicide terrorism.
There are some additional ingredients which matter quite importantly, and we can really see them in the suicide terrorist campaigns of the last 25 years all around the world.
And one of the core additional ingredients, as you correctly point out, is when a foreign occupation is married with a religious difference between the predominant religion of the foreign occupier and the predominant religion of the local community.
And this is true whether the difference is Christian-Muslim, or it's also been Hindu-Sikh, or it's also been Buddhist and Hindu, so we've had a whole variety of these religious differences producing suicide terrorist campaigns.
And it's also the case that this is true not because the religious difference basically causes just religious nuts in the occupied community or the local community to kind of go berserk.
You see, if you're confronted with a military presence where the military forces have a predominantly different religion, it's possible for the terrorist leader to demonize that military presence as driven by a religious agenda.
This is Osama explaining how we, that is the West, are Christian crusaders driven by a Christian agenda to convert Muslims, damage Islam, or help expand greater Israel so that Christians and Jews together can extend their control over Jerusalem.
Well, that kind of a logic or an argument can tear the bejesus out of secular and religious people in the local community, and so that can increase and accelerate the urgency with which the local believe that it's important to eject those foreign combat forces before that religious agenda can be implemented.
It really is amazing how much the war party in America has in common with Osama bin Laden, isn't it?
All the Islamofascists who are driven by their religious agenda who want to cut all our heads off and force all our children to pray to Mecca.
Well, the demonization element and using religion to demonize the other is quite a powerful mobilizing force, and Osama uses it, and I'm sorry to say that it has certainly become common to see in discourse in the United States.
The reason it's a difficult thing to penetrate is because it tends to lead to the conclusion that well, this is all about a religious conflict independent of circumstance, when the fact is there are many, many religious differences around the world that are not accompanied by a foreign military presence, and those do not lead to suicide terrorism.
You see, it's that core ingredient, that core circumstance of the foreign military presence which then can be exacerbated by additional factors that can really lead to the cocktail, if you would, that produces suicide terrorism, but those additional factors don't really seem to lead to suicide terrorism very much on their own.
Now, this is just so important, I guess it just bears repeating over and over again, that people have all kinds of religions around the world and believe in them to varying degrees.
Some of them so fanatically we couldn't even make hide in their hair of what they say or what they mean.
Exactly right.
We have a number of cases where we have Muslims and Christians who are side by side living peacefully and sometimes where there's actually conflict, but no suicide terrorism, such as in Nigeria.
Nigeria is a great case where we have here a very large pool of Muslims, many of them quite radical, in fact, many of them flossy, the brand of Islamic fundamentalism that Osama used to, and there is conflict in Nigeria.
That's probably one of the reasons why our oil prices keep jerking up and down, but the fact is we don't have any suicide terrorism occurring there.
If we were to find a foreign military presence going to Nigeria, then I think that there's a good chance that would likely change.
Well, and Sudan's on the list too.
Tell me about Sudan.
Well, Sudan is another case here where you see what's happening is that once you understand the causes of suicide terrorism, this tells us some things and not all of them are music to the ears of different parts of the political spectrum.
For instance, especially for folks in the war party or the group that's pushed for Iraq, the conclusions that suicide terrorism are really driven by foreign military presence, well, they're obviously unhappy because that means that we're losing the war.
The war on terrorism is heading south for a good reason, which is we're waging it on this faulty premise, and the premise that we're waging on is actually making the problem worse.
Well, in the case of Sudan, I'm afraid there's an opposite unhappy truth here, which is you see a lot of people would like to send an army to Sudan or a military force to Sudan to try to suppress a lot of the ethnic cleansing and the humanitarian abuse that's occurring there, and there's no doubt that's real, so I don't mean to minimize that for a moment.
But it is important to see that I'm afraid the conclusions here don't bode particularly well for such an intervention, especially by Western Europe or the United States or countries that would have a religious difference from Sudan.
And so even if we believe that we would be coming for purely innocent goals, I'm afraid the foreign military presence plus a religious difference would produce the conditions that could enable terrorist leaders to recruit folks to come and kill us.
Which just goes to show that ideas have consequences, and that as long as we wage this war on terrorism, so-called, based on the false premise that these people just hate us for our freedom, I guess we have two choices, either get rid of our freedom or just keep invading country after country.
And this is ultimately, as Michael Schoyer says in his article for AntiWar.com today, this is putting the American people in danger.
It's certainly the case that the longer we remain on the Arabian Peninsula with combat forces, the greater the risk of the next 9-11, 7-7, or Bali bombing, or worse.
And the fact is, we have to take seriously what is the enemy's best recruitment appeal.
How does the enemy recruit?
And when Osama gives speeches in order to recruit, he doesn't talk about 72 virgins.
His statements, his appeals for suicide attackers to come to kill us focus on the abuses that are occurring in the Muslim countries where there are American and Western combat forces.
And this is not only true of Osama, some of the most famous al-Qaeda leaders, but other tools of al-Qaeda that some of the listeners may not be quite as familiar with.
Perhaps the poster child for al-Qaeda's recruitment or efforts to recruit homegrown suicide attackers in the United States, Britain, and Australia is Adam Gadahn.
Adam Gadahn is 29 years old.
He's an American citizen.
He was born in Riverside, California.
His father was Jewish.
When he was very young, the family converted to Christianity.
And Adam decided to convert to Islam when he was a teenager.
So since 1998, Adam Gadahn has been living with Osama in Afghanistan, or now Pakistan.
And just last summer, he has begun to issue recruitment videos trying to recruit suicide attackers to kill us.
And his main recruitment appeal from beginning to end does not talk about 72 virgins or the pleasures of a martyr.
It's all about reacting to, it's a sympathetic appeal based on the plight of Muslims that are under foreign military occupation in Afghanistan, and especially in Iraq.
And now, Paul Wolfowitz, I guess famously again now, told Vanity Fair magazine in May of 2003 that one of the benefits of invading Iraq and occupying Iraq is that now we can move our bases out of Saudi Arabia.
And yet, I'm not so sure that moving some bases to Iraq and some others to Qatar and Bahrain and other states on the Arabian Peninsula is going to really mollify bin Laden all that much.
Does the Al Qaeda organization recognize British-drawn borders from the 1920s?
No, they don't, and you put your finger right on the core issue.
You see, the whole concept of Saudi Arabia for Osama and for many Muslims on the Arabian Peninsula just reeks of imperialism, because it's the British who drew the borders between Saudi Arabia and Yemen after World War I.
And what's the case is that Osama and those following him, and many others on the Arabian Peninsula, just simply reject those borders and think they don't constitute separate nationalisms.
This would be a little bit like if Britain today would try to explain to Georgia they're not really part of the United States, they're really different than Virginia, or Virginia's really different than New York, because we have to remember that originally the borders of Virginia and Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, these were drawn by the British.
We drew the Brits out, and then we decided, it took a few years, we didn't do this at first, we had first the Articles of Confederation, but then we decided to form the United States, which over time was viewed as American, that is wholly an identity separate from what the British drew.
Now, that's not to say there aren't some people who, of course, have some fondness for Virginia over New Hampshire and over New York, I don't mean to go so far as to say those differences don't matter at all, but you can see that this is very different.
If the British come in and draw the borders and then expect that somehow you're supposed to adopt the nationality that some foreigner has imposed on you, this is, in fact, likely to really to the reverse.
Right, and well, look at September 11th, how many Americans said, ah, well, that was just New York that got bombed, we don't care about that.
Exactly right.
Nobody.
This was a galvanizing event that brought the entire country together, and in fact, you know, even to this day, even though, you know, many folks in sort of the media and I also think some politicians have been expecting that, in fact, the effects of 9-11 would wane fairly substantially, and of course, it recedes a bit from public view, but the memories are actually fairly powerful memories, and they form the basis of our consciousness as Americans.
Now, what about blowback for Osama bin Laden, too?
You can't send guys around blowing up trucks and killing civilians all over the place without having your own problems result from that.
Well, and in fact, we actually know that Osama's very sensitive to this, and this is one of the reasons Osama's an especially difficult opponent.
You see, Osama is just, I don't mean to say he's a genius with 160 IQ, but he is just simply smarter than the average enemy that we have gone up against.
I sort of wish he had, were sort of more in the Saddam or Melissa Vick category, where they make mistakes and so forth that we can take advantage of, but Osama, one of the things that's important to note is that in his writings and in his strategy documents, he's thinking about the issue of blowback, and one of the places we saw this best was in the summer of 2005, al-Zawahiri, bin Laden number two, sent Zakari, that is the terrorist leader in Iraq, a 12-page single-spaced letter.
And that letter said that you must prepare for the Americans to leave over the next few years.
And what that means is, as Americans leave, it's important to put an Iraqi face and to make your movement more and more Iraqi.
It was already some Iraqi, but of course, as a Jordanian, Zarqawi was not an Iraqi.
And their argument was, bin Laden's argument or al-Zawahiri's argument was, if you don't do this, then the very groups who are now supporting you, the Sunnis, are going to kill you.
They're going to kill you because the fact of the matter is, and this is them speaking, the Sunnis are supporting you in order to have the foreigners leave, not to just embrace another set of foreigners.
And what happened is, Zarqawi, just nine months later, apparently was unable to restrain himself and it was tips from his very own people that led us to get the coordinates to kill him.
And now we see that local Sunnis are fighting al-Qaeda right now in Iraq.
That's exactly right.
And you see, we've seen this many times before, and I suspect that Osama has studied a fair bit of these previous suicide terrorist campaigns.
Let's take Hezbollah in the 1980s.
Well, you see, when American forces left in 1984 after the suicide terrorist attacks against us and French forces left after suicide terrorism against them, and then Israel began to pull back to this little buffer zone, what happened after 1986 is there was a bit of a mini-war here, a civil war, between Amal, which was another guerrilla group, and Hezbollah.
These are two Shia groups in southern Lebanon who fought each other and killed thousands of each other.
And the reason was because what was holding them together, what was unifying them, was the presence of those foreign combat forces.
And when the foreign combat forces either left altogether or receded fairly greatly, what that tended to do was bring out the differences between them.
One was more religious, the other was more secular.
And those kinds of fissures that we try to foment while we're there on top of them typically emerge on their own, and we probably couldn't stop it if we wanted to, when we leave.
And as we're kind of moving forces from Anbar province toward Baghdad, it's really not much of a surprise that we're actually getting more of a split inside the Sunni community, some of which directly against Al Qaeda.
And Michael Scheuer says today that the Giuliani doctrine, that is that they hate us for how good we are, is Al Qaeda's only indispensable ally.
It's the only thing that allows for all these wide and varied interest groups in the Muslim world to come together under Al Qaeda's banner.
Opposition to us.
Well, and you can see this in the Sunni triangle in Iraq is a good example of this.
There are now 13 different insurgent groups in the Sunni triangle, four of which are using suicide terrorism.
And they differ on numerous dimensions.
Some are nationalist, some are religious, some only take Iraqis, some take Iraqis and foreigners.
But what unifies them together, basically the only thing they seem to agree on, is that it's the American combat forces that are the power behind the throne of the government in Baghdad.
And so what they believe is that if the American combat forces left, then in fact the government in Baghdad would collapse.
And so as long as we're there, I'm afraid they see us as the key linchpin to holding that basically American puppet government over them.
And now Dr. Paul also said in the Republican debate and his comments afterwards, too, that bin Laden is glad that our combat forces are in Iraq now, that might seem a contradiction to some.
Do you agree with that?
Well, a bit.
I mean, there's a long term question here about how do you get American forces to leave the Arabian Peninsula and then stay out.
And our best window into this actually is this 2003 strategy document that I discussed earlier.
And I quote extensively from In Dying to Win.
And what that strategy document says is that it's probably not the case that hitting the American homeland even once or twice again is going to really knock American combat forces out of the Persian Gulf in the short term.
And so therefore they say they should not do that in the short term.
Instead, the idea was that they should try to use American combat forces that are there to mobilize more suicide attackers to kill us and to use those, at least over the last few years, to strip America of its military allies, to hit Spain, to hit Britain, to kill Australians in order to make it the case that it's American forces more and more and more on their own that are bearing the burden of the problem, which will then at some point, later point in time, make it possible for them to come back to either attack us here or just have the economic weight of that failed presence drive us out.
I have an article here by Brian Ross from May 5th.
New tape, Al Qaeda number two wants 200,000 to 300,000 U.S. dead in Iraq.
He was asked in an interview what he thought of the now dead timetable benchmark bill that the Democrats were trying to push through Congress, or at least supposedly were trying to push through Congress.
And Zawahiri answered, this bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap.
We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson.
So they've drawn us in, they slapped us in the face with September 11th to draw us in, bog us down, bleed our treasury dry, run our army into the ground, and then force us out for good.
That's exactly right.
And I'm afraid that what's happening with the kind of the persistence, the idea that we should just stay and die and just stay and die ad infinitum, I'm afraid is just working directly into Al Qaeda's game plan.
And the reason is because eventually the American public, like in Vietnam, is probably just going to want to pull the plug.
That is, that eventually if we just pursue a failed and failing strategy over and over and over again, what we're setting ourselves up for is a Vietnam-like defeat where eventually the American public werches us out.
And this is probably the worst of all possible worlds here in the Persian Gulf, not simply because it would embolden terrorists, I'm not sure that they would come, there's no evidence that they would launch offensive suicide terrorists against, suicide terrorism against us to try to march on Washington.
But I think that in fact it really is the case that we need some kind of a military strategy to stabilize the Persian Gulf, to secure our interests and access to oil, I don't mean conquering countries, but we need some sort of a minimal foreign policy connected with the Persian Gulf that we didn't really need in Iraq, I'm sorry, in Vietnam.
In Vietnam we really could walk away and completely abandon the area, basically isolate an isolationist policy toward Vietnam.
That's really not a possibility in the case of the Persian Gulf, at least wouldn't be a happy one.
And that's why I've been suggesting, and actually Paul has also been agreeing, that what we need is a policy of offshore balancing.
This is a more minimal foreign policy, this is a foreign policy that does not rely on ground forces on the Arabian Peninsula, and to the extent it does rely on military forces, their air and naval forces, but what it principally relies on are alliances, political, economic, and diplomatic alliances with states on the Arabian Peninsula, and uses a lot of our soft power advantages to much better effect.
So that's how to fight the real war on terrorism, then, is not send the military in to do regime change after regime change and turn countries into democracies, whatever that is, but instead to, well, in the words of Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, ramp this whole thing down, make it a police and intelligence matter as much as possible, a military one as little as possible.
In this case, there probably does need to be a military leg to the policy that we need to pursue for the Persian Gulf.
I don't mean to suggest that I think that we could do completely without a military aspect to it, but I do think that it could be a rather small part and a far less intrusive military policy than we've been pursuing.
And the idea that we're going to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun, I mean, this is what we've seen, I'm afraid, is just the fruits of such a foolish idea, because this is, I'm afraid, always destined to kind of produce the kind of nationalist backlash, which is producing a self-defeating policy.
And in fact, it's funny, because the policy isn't really based on they hate us for our freedoms.
The policy is based on they hate us because they don't have freedom, and in fact, I think Bush even admitted, you know, we've had this policy of propping up dictatorships, and it's created all this tension against us, and so then the solution was to change the regimes and make them better.
Well, that's true, and as you've seen, over the last few years in Iraq, we actually have had the political track of democracy going forward.
The fact is, there have been elections.
The fact is, the members of parliament who are elected, except for those that we have insisted that the parliament accepts, have actually been elected in reasonably free elections, certainly better than many people expected.
And the problem here has not really been an issue of the values of the local populations toward freedom and democracy.
The question here really has been, do you want Uncle Sam determining the, not just creating a condition, but actually determining your government?
And I'm afraid over the last few years, we've had a hard time keeping our hands out of the micromanagement game.
All right, we're all out of time.
Thanks very much for yours.
Oh, it's been a pleasure being here, Scott.
Robert A. Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, author of Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
