Alright my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com slash radio.
And our next guest is Robert A. Pape, he's a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and he's the author of Dying to Win, the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
It's great to be here again, Scott.
It's good to talk to you again, and well, geez, I thought that you won this argument back in 2005.
This book came out, and then I went to the Ron Paul barbecue, and he gave a speech all about it.
And then I interviewed you on the show, and we talked about it, and I wrote a whole article about it.
It seems like all 300 million Americans would get it by now, but apparently they don't, and so I thought maybe we could discuss, from your very dispassionate social scientific mathematical viewpoint, what it is that your work has shown about suicide terrorism.
What is that strategic logic?
Sure.
Well, over the last few years, I've compiled the first complete database of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world.
The first time I did the database was from 1980 to 2003, and now, most recently, I've updated that database through June of 2008, so just as of just a few months ago.
Oh, really?
This is a database which I don't just compile myself, but I have a research team of a dozen folks who are fluent in all the key native languages that you would expect to collect information about suicide terrorism around the world.
That's Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Tamil, Urdu.
We can do virtually any language at this point, and what's really quite phenomenal about the database is that it shows quite strongly that suicide terrorism is not mainly a product of religion, and it also really helps to show the effects of the Iraq War on suicide terrorism around the world.
So it's probably just helpful to explain that in just a little bit of detail.
Let's look at the first 24 years of suicide terrorism around the world from 1980 to 2004.
Well, during that period, there were 315 completed suicide terrorist attacks.
The world leader during that period, the first 24 years, was not an Islamic group at all.
They're a group some of the folks listening here won't have heard much about.
They're the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
They're a Marxist group.
They're a secular group.
They're a Hindu group.
The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka have done more suicide terrorist attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and that's true to this day.
They're still ahead of Hamas even as of now.
Most of the folks listening here won't have heard much about the Tamil Tigers because they're not attacking us, but just because they're not attacking us doesn't mean they don't do suicide terrorist attacks, and it's really helpful to find out who does suicide terrorist attacks, because as you can see, they're showing that religion is not the main issue.
But what over 95% of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world have in common since 1980, and this is true to this day, is not religion, but a specific strategic objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces from territory the terrorists consider to be their homeland or prize greatly.
From Lebanon to Chechnya to the West Bank to Sri Lanka to Kashmir and to Iraq and Afghanistan today, suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign military occupation.
Well, this, of course, you'll start to see immediately that then with Iraq and a new foreign military occupation after 2003, it really should not come as much of a surprise that a new foreign military occupation in Iraq should produce a large suicide terrorist campaign.
And in fact, it's actually still going on, even as a lot of the ordinary civil violence in Iraq has declined, which I'll explain in just a moment.
But if you look at suicide terrorism all around the world in 2004, from 2004 until the summer of 2008, until just a few months ago, there are over 1,250 suicide terrorist attacks, completed suicide terrorist attacks around the world.
And yes, there is a big change in the global pattern of suicide terrorism in the last four years compared to the first 24.
In the first 24 years, you'd be hard-pressed to count even 5% of those suicide terrorist attacks as anti-American.
Since the invasion of Iraq, over 89% of all the suicide terrorism around the world is directly a result of America's military presence in Muslim countries.
That's because the large number of suicide terrorist attacks that have been occurring, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I'll be glad to tell you more about as we go through the show.
But just to give you a sense of what's happening in Iraq, the first six months of this year, we've had 95 completed suicide terrorist attacks.
And that's probably somewhat of a conservative count, Scott, because you see, in order to get into the database that I compile, we have to have double verification of suicide terrorist attacks.
And so the fact is, that count of 95 is probably a conservative number, and it is down a bit from 2007.
It's down about a third from what the attacks are in 2007, but it's nowhere near.
It's still raging.
Suicide terrorism in Iraq is still raging compared to all the civil violence in Iraq.
You see, in Iraq, we've had two things happen.
We've had a civil war, which is three-sided.
That is, a war among Sunni, Shia, and Kurds.
And we've had suicide terrorism, which is all Sunni.
To this date, we have not had a single Shia or Kurdish suicide attacker in Iraq.
And although the causes of suicide terrorism in Iraq and the civil war have overlapped, they're not the same thing.
What's causing the civil violence in Iraq is that three-sided game, but what's causing the suicide terrorism in Iraq is predominantly the presence of American and Western combat forces in Iraq, and those suicide attackers are attacking either us directly or our local allies.
So what we've seen is, as the civil violence in Iraq has declined, I'm afraid the suicide terrorism, which is anti-American in nature, is high.
All right.
Now, there's a couple of things I wanted to start with.
First of all, everybody knows the saying, I don't know who originally coined it, but there's lies, there's damn lies, and then there's statistics.
And so I wanted to try to challenge you on a couple of things here.
First of all, did the Tamils – and I'm no statistician, so I don't know all the different number arguments and different directions to tackle this – but could it be argued that your inclusion of the Tamil Tigers in this is actually just skewing your results, and virtually everywhere else that you name there is a radical Islam factor or whatever, and that just because there's this one particular place where you have Hindu, secular, Marxist suicide bombers, that that is sort of throwing off all your statistics overall.
And then I wonder whether you include, I don't know, a suicide bombing in Indonesia, or a Syrian who comes to Iraq to commit a suicide bombing as a response to occupation in the same sense.
I know we spoke before about, well, the borders on the Arabian Peninsula don't really matter to these guys, and so having troops in Oman is the same as having them in Saudi Arabia to them, in the same sense that having a foreign military base occupying part of South Carolina would still be occupying America to me, even though I'm in Texas, that kind of thing.
So are you defining occupation that broadly?
And then also the Tamil Tigers thing there.
Sure, yeah, excellent question, Scott.
You're quite right that if you take the world leader, that is if you take the largest, one of the largest suicide terrorist groups, that is the Tamil Tigers, that has to have a disproportionate effect on the data as a whole, because it's the world leader.
So you're quite right that that's going to have that effect, but what I would also say is that if you look in this period, and we're talking mostly about the first 24 years of the conflict of suicide terrorism around the world, if you look at the second largest group, the Palestinians, they are also having a disproportionate effect.
You see, if you took the Palestinians out of the database of suicide terrorism around the world from since 1980, from 1980 to 2004, it would look like there were almost only secular suicide terrorists.
So the fact is, when you have the largest clump of events, they are going to really tell you something about the database as a whole.
And so if you took out the Tamil Tigers, things would look more religious.
But if you took out the core religious clump, that is the Palestinians, Hamas, then you would see that you'd have the opposite effect, which is that you, by deleting Hamas, you would have virtually, gosh, about 75% of all the suicide terrorist attacks that would be remaining would be secular.
So the best thing to do is actually just to include them all.
So rather than make artificial distinctions of, oh, we're only interested in this or that, the key thing is just to study suicide terrorism the way we study lung cancer, the way we study cancer.
You see, what we want to know with, let's say, lung cancer is we want to know who gets lung cancer and who doesn't get lung cancer.
And we want to know that around the world, not just in the United States and not just in subgroups, but we want to know that kind of generally around the world.
And then once we know who gets lung cancer and who doesn't, we want to start to correlate that with risk factors, such as smoking.
Well, that's what I'm doing with suicide terrorism.
Suicide terrorism, if you would, is the most deadly form of terrorism.
It's kind of the lung cancer of terrorism, so to speak.
And when you look at who gets and who doesn't develop suicide terrorism, you see that there's a pretty well-defined set of risk factors that encourage it.
And that core risk factor is foreign military presence on territory of the terrorist prize.
Now, that doesn't mean that every time there's a foreign occupation, you get suicide terrorism, just as every person that smokes doesn't get lung cancer.
And some people get lung cancer even if they don't smoke, just as some places, a tiny fraction that don't have foreign military occupation, get suicide terrorism.
But the fact is, by looking comprehensively at all the information rather than deleting any part of it, you get a pretty clear picture that enables you to sort of, in my case, make a prediction, which is if we invaded Iraq, we would get suicide terrorism, whereas most terrorism experts in 2002 were saying, no, we probably wouldn't get much suicide terrorism in Iraq, because Iraq was so secular.
So Iraq was a good test of this, because before Iraq, we were able to say that if foreign military occupation causes suicide terrorism, we should likely get a good-sized suicide terrorist campaign in Iraq.
But if religion is what's causing suicide terrorism in Iraq, then we probably shouldn't have much.
Right, because there shouldn't be any more than before.
There shouldn't be any more than before, because Iraq was so secular.
See, Saddam Hussein was, about as secular a leader and hated by a lot of the religious folks on the Persian Gulf as we could hope for.
He was not a religious man.
This was a man who worked against, he tried to do a lot to wring out a lot of the religion in Iraq.
And so what's happening here is that the very fact that America's invasion of Iraq, where there was no suicide terrorism in Iraq, none at all before our invasion, and it starts just on April 4th, 2003.
I mean, the very first suicide terrorist attacks in Iraq are just a week and a half after the invasion begins.
And then, of course, they've been continuing pretty much ever since.
It's a really strong indicator that the basic patterns I'm suggesting to you are not just a statistical artifact of sort of arcane statistics, but really represent phenomenon in the real world.
That when you have a foreign military presence on territory of the terrorist prize, that tends to scare the bejesus out of folks in the region that you're going to take over their way of life.
That you're going to come and not just have sort of tanks on the ground, but control governments.
And after all, in Iraq, what did we do?
We conquered, we toppled, and then we've installed a government.
And we're still trying to tell that government what to do.
Now, well, on the subject of science and truth and all that, I think you actually corrected my language before on this show, maybe a year ago or so when we talked about this, and said, well, I didn't prove it, I showed it.
And that kind of cuts to the truth of social science.
It's not quite the same as lung cancer, because we are talking about human beings' will, not just the cells in their lungs.
And so at the same time that it's not quite exactly hard science in the way hard science is hard science, and social science instead, at the same time, you can still find a heck of a lot of truth in here if you take an honest look at the numbers.
Well, if you sort of look at, let's take the 1,250 suicide terrorist attacks that we've had since 2004.
We've had about 800 of those attacks are in Iraq.
250 of those are in Afghanistan.
And if you look at, there are still suicide attacks occurring in Sri Lanka, some on the West Bank, a much smaller number.
I'd be glad to explain why those numbers went down.
Al-Qaeda has continued to do some suicide attacks.
But the fact of the matter is that when you look at those 1,250 attacks, you'll see that well over 90% are directly the result, that is, they were caused by the onset of foreign military presence on territory of the terrorist prize, because there were no suicide attacks in Iraq before our foreign military presence got there.
There were no suicide attacks in Afghanistan before we invaded the country.
And so what's happening is that for this pattern to be wrong that I'm explaining to you, there would have to be not just, we would have to not just be missing five or 50 suicide attacks somewhere occurring around the world that I'm not taking into account.
There would have to be hundreds of suicide attacks occurring somewhere around the world, South Africa, South America, in parts of the world, Bangladesh, in parts of the world where there's no American troops.
And what we're seeing is, in fact, the opposite.
We just know that the data, even though it may not be 100% perfect, we know the data is not likely to have, we've not likely missed hundreds of suicide attacks.
So that's actually, again, quite strong confirmation for the basic hypothesis.
Well, you know, if you rewind in time back before the war on terrorism and Islamofascism and all that, I grew up on stories of the kamikaze attacks and the war in the Pacific and World War II.
And I don't know if at the time they called that Shinto fascism or whatever.
It was just Japanese imperialism was the problem.
It wasn't the Shintoism of the people in charge.
And I've seen interviews with the old men who were on missions that for whatever reason they didn't die or they were set to go but never did or whatever.
And they explained, none of us, never mind anything you have ever heard, none of us were willing to do this for our love or glory for the emperor or anything like that.
This was simply about attempting to put off as long as possible the imminent invasion of our land and the killing of our families.
That's it.
A lot of truth to what you just said, Scott.
In fact, when you roll back to the history, the kind of historical precursors to modern suicide terrorism, the very first suicide attackers were the Jewish zealots in Zachari in the first century AD.
The Jewish zealots in Zachari were groups that were trying to foment sort of a rebellion against Roman occupation of the Hebrew people.
And the way they do it is they would go to a market, a square, say in Jerusalem, and Zachari would pull out a dagger and cut the throat of a Roman centurion.
And the other Roman soldiers who were standing nearby would often kill and stab the individual right on the spot.
And the hope was that by this event, this suicide attack, would trigger a revolt.
And in fact, the famous Jewish war of 66 AD, which led to the diaspora destruction of the temple and so forth, was the result of one of these Jewish Zachari attacks.
And that, too, was a response to foreign occupation.
Well, and it speaks also to the logic, as you call it in the book, the strategic logic of terrorism in general, suicide terrorism in particular, that the action is in the reaction.
We're talking, you call them the weak actors.
These are people who don't have a fighter jet they can climb aboard and bomb people from six miles away in the sky or what have you, fly across the ocean and bomb their capital city.
This is basically the only means that they have to fight.
And what they're trying to do is provoke a response in order to rally more support to their side so that eventually, I guess, they'll be powerful enough to really fight back.
That's exactly right.
And so that's why the longer the foreign military occupation goes on, the more of the hornet's nest that we have tended to unleash.
And I want to be specific about the hornet's nest of suicide terrorism.
You see, the reason that 9-11 was able to kill 3,000 people, it wasn't just a terrorist attack.
That was a suicide attack where the 19 hijackers were willing to give their lives instantly in order to kill 3,000 Americans.
Well, that probably could not have happened at all, certainly not anywhere near 3,000 American lives lost had it not been for the element of a suicide attack.
And that's why I focus so much on the causes of suicide terrorism, per se, because I'm not really trying to suggest that the causes of terrorism and suicide terrorism are the same, much as I don't think we would think that the causes of lung cancer and all cancer are the same.
I think that it could well be that the causes of terrorism in general are multifaceted and have lots to do with economic problems, have lots to do with ideological issues.
But the reason to focus on suicide terrorism is because that's the threat, that's the deadly threat that is most of concern to us.
And it's the element of terrorism that's actually growing and growing so much with our invasion of Iraq.
Okay.
Now, in your book, you talk about the role of religion and its importance, something you alluded to a moment ago, a couple answers back, about the difference between the occupiers and the occupiees.
And this is something I think really comes out when you discuss Sudan, where you have this terrible violence, you have all these different warring factions, and to different degrees, they're all Arabs and they're all Muslims, and there are some ethnic differences, but it's mostly a war over resources between nomads and farmers.
And you have hundreds of thousands, literally hundreds of thousands of people killed, and yet no suicide terrorism, because even though the people are being horribly oppressed, what they do not have to fear is that these people are, after they kill me, they're going to force my son or daughter to change their religion, to change their language, to destroy our entire way of life, and that these are the kinds of circumstances that particularly drive suicide attacks.
Oh, excellent, Scott.
And I'm so glad you brought that up, because you see, underneath the issue of foreign military presence is what the consequences of foreign military presence are.
And if you could just imagine, say, a Chinese army landing, if you would, in Texas, it wouldn't just be the Chinese army sitting in Texas in this physical space they would occupy, it's what that represents for our way of life and the independent ability, our independent ability to determine how our children, our grandchildren should live their lives, and their ability to not be sort of constrained, dominated, or shaped by some foreign outside force.
And that's exactly what's happening with suicide terrorism.
And it's also why, if you want to know, well, why is it that some occupations, some military occupations, lead to suicide terrorism and others don't?
Well, it turns out that there's a very important additional risk factor, which is the foreign military occupations where there's also a religious difference.
That is, a difference between the predominant religion of the foreign military forces and the local community.
When there's a religious difference, no matter what the differences are, actually, often, that tends to lead to suicide terrorism, where those without such a difference don't.
And why is that?
It's because when there's a religious difference, that enables the terrorist leaders to demonize the foreign military presence, to essentially scare the bejesus out of their local population that, look, it's the foreign occupier that's driven by religion.
This is why Osama bin Laden uses the crusader image so much in talking about the United States.
We're not just a big, powerful country, according to bin Laden.
We're a crusader, meaning a religiously motivated aggressor.
And in bin Laden's terms, he paints us as so religiously motivated that we're out to Christianize Muslims, or to damage Islam, or to take the resources from Islam and give it to Christians, or to essentially help Israel expand so that Christians and Jews together can have more control over Jerusalem.
Well, those arguments that bin Laden makes, he's really only able to make them at all, credibly at all, with foreign military presence in Muslim countries.
Absent that foreign military presence in Muslim countries, a lot of those arguments would just ring hollow.
Well, you know, our government, our war party, and particularly the most thoughtless and crass among them, basically used the exact same argument.
It's based on a truth of a threat that is obviously much paler in comparison.
September 11th is horrible as it was.
Still, that was the last one, and that was quite a while ago now.
And yet, the idea, just September 11th itself, as representing the vanguard of this global Islamic caliphate that seeks to convert us all, and cut our heads off, and force our kids to convert to Islam and get gay married, and whatever the hell it is that they are scaring the American people about.
Basically, that's it.
That these people want to come here, destroy America, change our way of life, which they're not quite strapping bombs right to our young men's chest right now, but it still has provided the motivation.
And a lot of people, as hollow as it might ring to some ears, a lot of people, this is enough for them to send their son to go and kill people in foreign lands.
The very same argument.
You're exactly right, Scott.
And on the side of the terrorists, when we look at this argument from their perspective, notice how weak they are.
Notice how they have no options.
It's not as if Muslims who face a Western military occupation can very easily respond with armies or with conventional forces, which in fact means they're desperate.
They're desperate to pursue, to regain that independence of self-determination, and that desperation often leads to suicide attacks, precisely because that tends to be their best way to fight back.
Well, and as you also point out, this is really no good as a strategy if you're, say, for example, the Uyghurs in Western China, because the Politburo doesn't care.
You can blow yourself and other people up all day, and that's just less people they look at, like they have to feed or whatever.
They don't mind.
But in America, again, the action is in the reaction.
This is the kind of thing that works effectively against democracies, as it seems like they knew what they were doing in the start, and since September 11th and their attacks, as you've talked about in Spain as the obvious example, they've succeeded in targeting democracies specifically with these kind of attacks.
They have.
They have, Scott.
And this lesson is very, very important for the future for one reason, and that's Afghanistan.
You see, what we're seeing right now on the part of both parties, this is true of McCain and true of Obama, is that we're now forging a consensus that we should put more troops into Afghanistan, more ground forces into Afghanistan, and this is actually quite a dangerous thing to have.
Notice how we're not actually having a debate about whether we should send troops to Afghanistan.
Both parties are actually agreeing that this, and they're maybe debating a little bit about the numbers, but why do I say that?
It's because in Afghanistan, as I mentioned before, there have been about 250 suicide terrorist attacks in Afghanistan.
Well, nearly all of those have occurred since 2005.
Now, why is that?
I mean, after all, we went in and toppled the Taliban in fall 2001.
What happened in 2005?
Well, what actually, if you look closely inside the trajectory, some very important information jumps out at you.
You see, in October 2003, that's when the U.N. gave authorization for NATO, that is the Western International Forces, to expand their presence out of Kabul.
For the first few years we were in Afghanistan, we were basically just occupying Kabul, sort of the capital city, but not much else.
If you look at the expansion of our control and spread of military forces through the country, what happens is in 2004, 2005, and then 2006, we essentially expand our military presence, not just in the north and in the western part, but then into the southern and the eastern part, which is where the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan are, which, of course, are kindred populations, kindred to the Taliban.
And what's happened is that as we've spread and expanded our control, our military presence in Afghanistan, especially into the south and into the east, we have unleashed a large wave of suicide terrorism.
And that suicide terrorism, I'm afraid, can grow still stronger.
You see, we increased our forces from about 15,000 in 2003 to 43,000 in 2008, that is just of this year, and what we're talking about doing is adding some forces, maybe 10,000 forces, maybe 20,000, but nowhere near enough to actually suppress and control large parts of the country.
So right now in Afghanistan, I'm afraid our policies are heading toward the worst of both worlds.
We're basically putting enough ground forces in Afghanistan in order to foment a fairly large and serious anti-American suicide terrorist campaign, but I'm afraid we're not putting in enough where we're actually getting the benefit of actually suppressing much of the violence in Afghanistan.
Well, and would you recommend that they did, or you're over it by now?
I think it's highly unlikely that it would make sense to put in, say, a quarter million troops into Afghanistan.
Number one, I think that's totally politically unfeasible.
Number two, I think it's military.
We've been stretched so thin by Iraq that the idea that we're going to put that large number in Afghanistan is just simply a non-starter.
Number three, even if we somehow did, I think it would create even more problems with Pakistan.
Right now we're having a tremendous problem where we're actually starting to have shooting between American forces and Pakistan troops across the border.
Pakistan's about had enough of us stirring up the hornet's nest here of terrorism right there in their country.
And so what's happening is that I think that, unfortunately, we have sort of a consensus that's emerging to sort of put more troops in Afghanistan when probably what we should be doing is thinking about demilitarizing Afghanistan and replacing a lot of those military tools with more straightforward economic tools and political tools.
It's really helpful to know or helpful to remember that the biggest reason that civil violence went down in Iraq was not an increase of 20,000 troops in Iraq, not a surge of troops, but was the Anbar Awakening.
The Anbar Awakening was 80,000 Sunni terrorists and insurgents who had been trying to kill Americans and armed to kill Americans, and many did kill Americans, that we pay $300 a month to not shoot us.
And that has turned out to be extremely helpful in calming down Anbar, and that economic tool, and yes, concession to terrorism, has actually turned out to be incredibly stabilizing, and we should remember that lesson as we go forward in Afghanistan.
Yeah, and you know, that's really one of the keys there is the American tough guy having to back down and what have you.
And I've been in this argument and neglected to point out, I guess, or figure out a way to spin that, like, listen, you know, this isn't the same thing as just capitulating to Osama bin Laden to be smart and figure out what it is that you're doing that's creating the problem and try to do less of that.
What it would mean to actually concede or appease terrorists would be to give them their goal.
And you see, right now, we're actually making a mistake by simply defining our strategy in terms of the goal of terrorists.
What we should be doing is figuring out what is our goal, what are we seeking to achieve, and then tailoring our instruments to achieve our goal.
We shouldn't define ourselves in light of the terrorists.
The fact of the matter is we have a tremendous interest in building strong relationships with the Pashtuns in Afghanistan and using economic tools to build relationships with the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, just as we have a strong interest in building strong relationships with Sunnis in Iraq and using economic tools to build relationships with those Sunnis in Iraq.
This is about what serves America's interests and America's goals in these regions and should not be defined in terms of, we shouldn't be defining our policy in terms of the terrorist goals.
This, in fact, means that the terrorists somehow would be winning because then we would be losing sight of what are our objectives in the region.
All right, now, well, let's see.
I guess we don't have too much time, so I'll leave the Lebanon question for another day.
What about, well, shit, no, I guess I will ask Lebanon because I forgot what my other question was going to be.
There's an example in Lebanon where Israel occupied Lebanon.
They finally left in the year 2000, and so what's Hezbollah and their suicide campaign looked like since then, I guess?
Zero, zero since 2000.
What happened in Lebanon is in June 1982, Hezbollah, the famous suicide terrorist group, did not exist.
In June 82, Israel invaded southern Lebanon with 78,000 combat soldiers, 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles.
One month later, Hezbollah was born.
Hezbollah then began to do suicide attacks, probably just experimenting with them, really, and they knocked American forces out of Beirut, they knocked French forces out of Beirut, and they eventually, years later, knocked all Israeli forces out of the country in 2000, as you just mentioned.
And the important point is that Hezbollah's suicide attackers did not follow the Americans to New York, did not follow the French to Paris, they didn't follow the Israelis to Tel Aviv.
There has not been a single Hezbollah suicide attack since the foreign forces left, that is, since Israel left the country in 2000, not even during the summer of 2006, during that dust-up between Hezbollah and Israel, the basically war of Hezbollah's missiles against Israel's air force.
And notice that's not a pattern.
It's either the onset of the suicide terrorism or its ending.
It can be explained by Islamic fundamentalism.
Everybody knows that Hezbollah's still an Islamic fundamentalist group, and especially in the summer of 2006, my goodness, if you're just looking for any old excuse to punch the button and get a quick trip to heaven, then there should have been a lot of Hezbollah suicide attackers in the summer of 2006.
And there simply wasn't, because Hezbollah didn't need to resort to suicide to keep Israel out of Lebanon.
Okay, now I remember my brilliant question, which is very important.
And if it's okay with you, can I keep you just a couple of minutes over time?
Go right ahead.
We'll definitely answer your questions.
We may be walking all over whoever shows up next, but oh well.
So the important part was this, the demographic profile of suicide terrorists.
Now, it's hard for anybody who's not a killer to think of a suicide terrorist as anything but an absolute psychotic, murderous madman.
And yet, there's got to be nuance and truth buried within that caricature that people need to understand.
Well, that's right.
We like our villains to be monsters, as you just said.
We like them because, after all, that keeps a distance between ourselves and folks who are actually trying to kill us.
But when we look closely, my study looked at 462 suicide terrorists.
The demographic profile very closely.
This is the largest study of the demographic profile of suicide terrorists that we have.
And what's really quite stunning is that only a small fraction fit this kind of standard stereotype of the uneducated loner who has little prospects of a job, marginal people.
The fact is, overwhelmingly, suicide terrorists are working class or middle class.
They're teachers.
They're ambulance drivers.
They're security guards.
These are plumbers.
These are folks who are either blue collar or middle class workers.
They're often folks not just with high school degrees, but 54% of all the Arab suicide attackers have had some degree of college.
It's actually quite common for there to be college-educated suicide attackers.
And, in fact, they come from a diverse background of colleges, not just both religious colleges and secular colleges to be studying engineering.
This is actually quite a common pattern.
And you see what's also happening with suicide terrorists is I'm afraid there's often so many volunteers to become suicide terrorists that suicide terrorist groups are often in a position of being able to select.
And they're often trying to select individuals not just who will kill themselves, that's kind of the easy part of the job, but who will actually be able to pull off the attack, the main purpose of the attack, to kill others.
Because, you see, the suicide terrorist groups are typically looking to kill 10 people for a suicide attack, a dozen people.
Al-Qaeda is often interested in killing 20 or 30 people for each suicide bomber that they use.
And what they're trying to do is kill, kill members of a target audience to produce political effects that fit their goals.
All right, everybody, that's Robert A. Pape.
He's a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
The book is Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, a very important book.
And thank you again for coming on the show.
Glad to be here, Scott.
And I'm sorry we still have so many troops in Iraq that this problem is continuing.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
Go ahead and stay on a couple of minutes.
Why not?
Here's the thing about this.
We have this whole policy that says that the reason that these people are terrorists, the demographic profile, the reason that they're terrorists is not because they're graduate students who actually know about some things in the world and are driven to what they perceive, at least, as righteous anger against us.
It's because they're poor and hopeless and degenerate, because they live in these terrible third-world countries.
And so what we have to do is remake the Middle East for them, which, of course, means toppling all their governments and occupying all their countries in order to make us all safer.
Just ask Sarah Palin.
We've got to fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here.
I mean, we're talking about the bottom line, basic line of BS, the false premise that underlies this entire campaign.
Well, that's quite right.
I'm afraid that we have the political narrative that you hear from the Bush administration and now certainly from McCain and Palin is exactly the opposite of what's actually driving suicide terrorism.
And I'm afraid it's even worse than that.
You see, if you wage our response to terrorism on the false premise that suicide terrorism is mainly a product of Islamic fundamentalism, then, of course, you're going to be drawn to policies that will involve militarily wringing the Islamic fundamentalism out of countries.
But what we see is that, in fact, suicide terrorism is mainly a product of response to foreign occupation.
And, therefore, that policy, which might make some sense if religion really were the cause, is exactly the sort of policy that's likely to make the trouble worse.
And this is a problem, I want to emphasize, of not just them fighting us over there and kind of keeping us as sort of the suicide terrorism over there, but Osama bin Laden has been fomenting a number of plots.
And you might remember that just a year ago at Fort Dix, the FBI broke up an important plot to blow up a military base at Fort Dix, and I could sort of go through a number of these plots.
And we've been fortunate to actually foil some of the plots.
I know some of the listeners may not like to think that the FBI is sort of telling you the truth when they tell you about some of these plots, but some of them are actually quite serious, and we've been fortunate so far to disrupt them, because the longer we're over there, I'm afraid the more energy we're giving to al Qaeda to keep trying to get us over here.
Yeah, I would argue that most of those cases are bogus, but, of course, as you've pointed out, there's still terrorist attacks.
Suicide terrorist attacks all across the world have skyrocketed since they embarked on this policy.
And there's so many other statistics that kind of surround your argument that aren't included exactly in the work that you did in Dying to Win, but there was a study that was a joint study by some Saudis and Israelis.
I think the Saudi government, an Israeli university or something, where they tracked individual suicide terrorists who had traveled to Iraq from Saudi Arabia, I guess Libya, Syria, et cetera, to go fight in Iraq, and how 99 percent of them, 99.9, were young kids who had never been a terrorist before, but only since the invasion of Iraq, that the only role that the old Mujahideen warriors from the Afghan war, the Bosnian war, leftover guys played in it was making the phone calls and the arrangements and getting it done, but mostly they all stayed home.
You're quite right, that a suicide terrorist is typically their first experience with violence is their very own suicide terrorist attack.
And if we look at the attackers in Iraq, we actually see a number of important patterns.
You see the two largest groups of people who are doing suicide attacks in Iraq are Iraqi Sunnis and then Saudis.
The next largest are from Syria.
And the overwhelming majority of suicide attackers in Iraq are coming either from Iraq itself or the immediately adjacent border areas, some of which have been on our hit list to go after and transform next.
That is, what you're seeing in Iraq is not a global jihad of the radicals of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world somehow congregating on Iraq, not at all.
What you're seeing is a regional opposition by coming out of about 50 or 55 million Sunnis who happen to inhabit the Arabian Peninsula, a regional opposition to American and Western military dominance of the Arabian Peninsula.
And so what I'm afraid you're seeing here is that until that foreign military force, especially the ground forces, actually shrinks, I'm afraid we have good reason to suspect that anti-American suicide terrorism is going to continue to rage out of the Arabian Peninsula.
And, you know, there was the Gallup poll that went around and studied for years.
The book is Who Speaks for Islam?
And they did for years.
They interviewed thousands of people.
And by their numbers, the people who supported terrorism, not just political violence in general, and I don't know if they were as specific as suicide terrorism, but at least who supported terrorism against Western interests, were no more likely to be religious than not, that it was simply all about human beings on earth, real politics, not 72 virgins in heaven or anything along those lines.
Well, one of the things, when I give talks, Scott, I now show quite a few martyr videos, and I also show some of Al-Qaeda's recruitment videos.
And Adam Gadon, and some of your listeners may just go on the web and be able to find some of the videos by Adam Gadon.
He's an American.
He's an American who was born in Riverside, California.
He's about 30 years old, and he's been living with Osama since 1998, either in Afghanistan or now in the tribal regions of Pakistan.
Well, in the last few years, he has become the poster child to recruit homegrown suicide attackers to kill us.
And if you would just, you know, if your listeners just go on the web, they don't have to see my presentations, but if they would go on the web, they would be able to come up with some of the transcripts of Adam Gadon, and you would see that his main appeal, almost from beginning to end, has very little to do with religion.
No 72 virgins.
This is all about responding to the military atrocities of Western occupation of Muslim countries, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's almost beginning to end.
And if, you know, this is what Al-Qaeda thinks is its best mobilization appeal, that's really quite important, because that's how they're using their poster child to basically try to recruit future suicide attackers to hurt us, based on those events.
And you know, maybe the only actually intelligent thing that Paul Wolfowitz ever said in this interview, or ever, was the Vanity Fair interview right after the fall of Saddam Hussein's statue, where he said that, you know, a big side effect, a wonderful great part of this invasion and occupation of Iraq, was now we'll be able to move our troops out of Saudi Arabia and move them to Iraq, because of course, having our troops in Saudi Arabia, he meant to say, you know, the parentheses understood here, was for the blockade and the bombing, the no-fly zone bombing of Iraq ever since 1991, that that was the biggest recruiting tool for Osama Bin Laden and the terrorists against us, and that it was imperative that we get our troops out of there, and you know, I don't know why moving them to Iraq is that much better, moving them to Oman, but...
Yeah, you're actually, I'm afraid, moving them to Iraq...
See, where the boundaries between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and say Qatar, where I just was last week, and the UAE, they were drawn by the British after World War I.
So, not only Osama Bin Laden, but many folks on the Arabian Peninsula, view those boundaries as essentially artificial creation of Western imperialism.
So they don't take seriously the boundaries between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
So, for them, it's the Arabian Peninsula, you see, and so I'm afraid Wolfowitz's idea that, oh, you know, it'll somehow matter to the terrorists, whether or not we have, you know, sort of military units or armor units sitting near Riyadh, or 30, 40 miles north in the southern part of Iraq, no, I'm afraid that really is not going to be a major consideration.
I mean, after all, it's important to remember that we are the high-precision military.
We are not just any old military sitting on the Arabian Peninsula, but a handful of our divisions conquered Baghdad in 2003.
If we wanted to topple Riyadh, we could do that not in just three weeks, but probably in about four days.
And so the fact of the matter is, we are just a powerful 800-pound gorilla, and then we put our footprint down on the Arabian Peninsula, man, that really does connote an awful lot of political control in addition to that foreign presence.
Okay, well, so what Wolfowitz said wasn't that smart.
I'm afraid it's the kind of concession that's exactly likely to lead to the worst of both worlds, because by thinking that you're somehow, you know, moving troops somehow, you're likely to encourage and embolden the terrorists to think you'll move still further, but you're actually not diminishing their ability to fire up their troops and to fire up recruits and to get more walk-in volunteers, because it's going to be very easy for Osama bin Laden to just explain that, look, and in fact, even worse, in 1996, bin Laden gave a speech, and he gave a speech where he laid out what would happen on the Arabian Peninsula with America's no-fly zones.
He said, and this is what he said in 1996, that soon America would invade Iraq, break it into three pieces, and then do the same to the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.
Well, that was in 1996.
And, of course, what happened in 2003 is his prediction came true, which made it even more difficult for us to somehow argue that our military presence was benign, because he was able to point to his speech saying, this is what I told you they would do.
Well, he also said in the summer of 2006, everybody look out, they're coming to Somalia, they're coming to Sudan.
Six months later, we proved him right in backing the Ethiopian regime change invasion of Somalia, which American troops participated in.
And, of course, John McCain and Barack Obama both have pledged to invade Sudan.
Well, I'm afraid that that's why it's important to sort of have public education about the risk factors of suicide terrorism, because it's awfully easy to think we're pursuing policies that will be enlightened policies, will make matters better.
Sometimes we think that, gee, if it's just a policy that's pursued by a Democrat, somehow the very same policy pursued by a Democrat is somehow better than by a Republican, and vice versa.
But the fact of the matter is, with suicide terrorism, it really is terribly important to see that foreign military occupation is head and shoulders above the other risk factors in driving that threat.
And so foreign military presence in Muslim countries, especially where there's also a religious difference, is exceedingly dangerous.
All right, folks, that's Robert A. Pape from the University of Chicago.
The book is Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
Thanks very much for your time today, Bob.
Thanks for another great interview, Scott.
