09/09/09 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

And speaking of that, by the way, if I don't respond to your email, I'm really sorry, but I get more and more email all the time from people all over Earth, and I try to answer them all, but it's not always that easy.
But it is scott at antiwar.com if anyone wants to try.
Okay, next guest is John Pfeffer.
He's the co-director of foreign policy in focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, and he writes its regular world beat column.
His past essays, including those for tomdispatch.com can be read at his website, which is johnpfeffer.com.
And he's got this article that ran, I guess, a couple of weeks ago at antiwar.com, co-written with Tom Englehart.
You know how it is with Tom Englehart's introduction.
This is called Our Suicide Bombers, Thoughts on Western Jihad.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, try and remind me if we have any time at the end here to ask you some things about Korea, because I know you're a real expert on that kind of stuff.
But this is an excellent article, and I've been meaning for quite a while to bring you on the show here.
And I thought at first I could maybe get in character and try to pretend to just talk about all the heroic American suicide bombers and be ironic and that kind of thing.
But whatever.
We might as well just get to the real point, which is that terrorism is terrorism depending on what's your point of view.
And you talk about how in Thomas Jefferson's war, which did he then get a letter marking reprisal for that.
He sent the Navy to go and fight the Barbary pirates in what we now call Libya.
And there was a massive suicide attack by the U.S. Navy against the forces of the Barbary pirates, as you report in this article here.
Tell us about that.
Sure.
Well, it's a little known incident.
Basically, this was our first war after the Revolutionary War, and this was at a time when we basically didn't have much of an army, didn't have much of a Navy.
And we were pretty much outclassed, even against what were really a ragtag group of privateers who were working with the Barbary states of North Africa.
And we were outgunned.
We decided, OK, here's one way of evening the playing field, of leveling the playing field.
We will pack a ship with explosives and send it into the harbor and try to destroy the enemy's castle, his ships, as many of the enemy combatants as possible.
But we weren't sure it was going to work.
So basically, the Navy commandant says, well, who volunteers to go on this ship to basically blow themselves up with the ship to make sure that it goes to the right place, that it doesn't fizzle, and that all these explosives then get into the hands of the enemy.
And he was overwhelmed by the number of Navy, U.S. Navy men who volunteered for the suicide mission.
They went ahead with it.
They blew it up.
They actually didn't succeed in destroying very much other than their own ship.
But it does stand as some of the first casualties missing in action of U.S. servicemen in American history.
And one of the first cases of suicide bombings, at least in the modern sense of the word.
Well, and you and Tom Englehart in this article here, quote, is one of the sailors on the ship or one of the Marines on the ship or something.
He wrote out how it went down, how the captain announced and how each and every man volunteered to go ahead and go down with the ship and everything.
And I mean, I guess that clearly wasn't necessary, right?
You could have done it with a skeleton crew, but instead it was like the Alamo where none of us are going to not do it.
There was a great deal of support for this kind of a mission.
And this was the feeling among the Navy personnel that this was a way of being heroic.
And this is the same kind of spirit that's inculcated in military training all around the world, whether we're talking about a state's militia or we're talking about a terrorist organization, a so-called terrorist organization, you know, they basically go through the same kind of basic training in which they kind of make sure that people are willing to sacrifice their lives on behalf of something.
Now, in this case, it was on behalf of, you know, the American democracy and in other cases it's on behalf of maybe Islamic fundamentalism, maybe nationalism, a variety of different things.
But it amounts to the same thing in the end.
Well, now, is this just one example and you and Tom Englehart in this article are trying to equate Americans with evil terrorists because you have this one thing from the Barbary War of the Thomas Jefferson administration, or is this something that really has a long and rich history in the United States?
Well, it's not just the United States.
I mean, you could look at the Western tradition in general and identify a kind of genealogy in which we have celebrated the heroic acts of individuals who have sacrificed themselves in order to achieve military ends.
And that goes back to the Bible.
Samson pulled down the temple around himself to kill off the Philistine leadership in an act of heroic self-sacrifice.
It continues into the Roman era with the Jewish Sicarians who sacrificed themselves in assassination plots.
It continues into European history during the Crusades, certainly during the 18th and 19th century and the kind of rise of nationalist movements and anti-authoritarian movements in which, again, people went on suicide missions in order to kill kings or to have, you know, to instigate political revolution.
And of course, into the modern era, we find that suicide attacks become, again, an opportunity by which militaries try to even the odds.
We saw it with the United States in World War II, a number of cases of suicide attacks, and we see it with other countries as well.
And so it's not just them, these others who are involved in suicide missions.
Unfortunately, it's an aspect of the military tradition in the East and West, in North and South.
Well, and you know, I think it's funny if you just take the time out, I think, well, I guess I shouldn't speak for others, but it seems like the kind of thing that we all learn about as little kids.
I guess I must have learned about it, you know, at an age so young that I don't remember when, that, you know, heroic Americans in combat, whether in Vietnam or in World War II, I guess I always skip Korea, but at least in Vietnam or World War II, heroic soldiers were guys who, you know, got medals posthumously because they jumped on a grenade to save their buddies, or they took a machine gun and went into, obviously, suicidal odds in order to provide cover so that their buddies could escape, or whatever.
These are the men who win the Silver Star.
People who know they're going to die, and they do it anyway for a greater cause, namely their buddies in that combat situation, usually.
Yeah, that's true.
And you know, there's this belief somehow that the terrorists are only targeting civilians, for instance, and therefore there's a stark contrast between our heroes, who only are involved in military missions, and those terrorists who go after innocent civilians.
But in fact, a great number of these terrorist organizations deliberately target military installations, or they target soldiers or police, people that they see as oppressors in some sense, and as the enemy in a war in which they, too, are foot soldiers.
So that's one contrast that I think is out there as a stereotype.
We only, you know, fight military battles, and they go after innocent civilians.
The other kind of stereotype is that we, with our military operations, focus strictly on killing soldiers, and we never kill civilians, and that they, you know, kill civilians deliberately rather than accidentally.
But in fact, in our military operations, both traditionally, whether we're looking at World War II or before World War II, we've very deliberately targeted civilian populations, whether that was Tokyo fire bombings, or the attack on Hiroshima with nuclear weapons, or in Dresden.
We've done it for very particular military reasons, to kind of destroy the resolve of the population and their support for the enemy's government.
But nevertheless...
Well, and now we do it just recklessly and say, well, it's just collateral damage.
You can't kill the bad guy without killing all the women and children who happen to be children in the same house as him.
That's correct.
And you know, we have, with our predator drone attacks, killed an enormous number of civilians in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
And you know, it's something that it's almost factored into the equation, and it's something that we know is going to take place.
And we, at times, might try to minimize the damage, but ultimately, you know, as you say, we chalk it up to collateral damage, and it's not something that we lose all that much sleep over.
Well, you know, I remember learning about World War II when I was a kid, about how the Japanese were so brainwashed from their loyalty to the Emperor, that they would dive-bomb their planes.
And I guess I even remember watching on TV a thing that was all about the kamikaze attacks and showed a lot of the different footage of it, or whatever.
And they didn't mention in that, that there were actually American kamikazes, literally in the Pacific, in sea battles versus Japan, who in suicide dive-bomb missions crashed their planes into Japanese ships.
And at least for the people who were exposed to the stories of those men, you detail two of their stories in this article here.
They were portrayed as heroes, not as crazy people who were so brainwashed in their loyalty to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman that they would do such a thing.
But they were heroes who were protecting their comrades, as they call them in battle, I guess, by trying to sink an enemy ship.
No different than the Japanese in the same battle, doing the very same thing.
That's correct.
And the Japanese relied a great deal more on kamikaze pilots, in part because near the end of the war they were completely outclassed, and they were going down to defeat, and this was a kind of last-ditch attempt for them.
But if you look earlier in the war, especially whether in the cases that you talk about, or in propaganda films that the United States produced, you see that we have a kind of similar ethos.
So for instance, there's Flying Tigers, which was a John Wayne movie.
And there too, the American pilot sacrifices himself in essentially a kamikaze mission.
He does so to save his buddies, but he also does so for the greater cause of the war.
And if the war had turned against us in the later stages, there's no telling whether we would have resorted to similar tactics as the Japanese.
But as it was, we were more successful, and therefore didn't have to rely on such sacrifices.
And now you also say that in the Philippines, which I guess at least at that time, I guess probably still I'm pretty ignorant about the Philippines, honestly, but I think that's a Catholic country from all those years of domination by Spain there, and they used suicide bombings against Americans in the great war against the Philippines that Americans have no idea happened.
That's correct.
Those in general were not the Catholic parts of the Philippines, those were largely from the Muslim parts of the Philippines.
And in some sense, this is the kind of alternative genealogy that's been put out to demonstrate that suicide bombing is kind of intrinsic to Muslim culture, to Islamic fundamentalism.
And so the genealogy begins with the assassin cult of, you know, around the 11th, 12th century.
And a group of people who, you know, basically sacrificed themselves in order to assassinate leaders that they disagreed with, stretched that to these attacks, suicide attacks by Muslim guerrillas, essentially against Spanish occupiers and then American occupiers in the Philippines, and then to today's Hamas and Hezbollah.
And so that's the kind of counter genealogy that suggests that they have this tradition as part of their religion that kind of forces them to submerge their individual desires to the collective religious needs of the community, and therefore they'll sacrifice themselves in these suicide attacks.
But in fact, there's not much evidence at all, other than these two isolated examples, that this is part of Islamic tradition, any more than it's part of Christian tradition or Jewish tradition.
And so the only substance to that that I see is, I think, again, you know, what the hell do I know about the Muslim world either?
But I do kind of get the sense that people consider, well, and you hear right wing Americans say, America is a Christian nation, that kind of thing.
They consider land where Muslims live to be Muslim land.
And so occupying it is obviously the actual concrete, earthly, political, you know, here and now reason that they're fighting, but it's always easy to kind of cloak it all in religiosity because it's an Islamic thing, especially to defend Muslim land from outside aggression, right?
Right.
But, you know, that's the key, really, to understanding why we have experienced a kind of rise in suicide bombings in the last 20 to 30 years.
It's largely as a result of the policies of occupation, and for the same reason that Muslim guerrillas were using these tactics back in the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century in the Philippines against their occupiers.
We see a similar trend, basically, since the early 1980s, the rise of suicide bombings used by Hezbollah in Lebanon as a kind of reaction to Israeli occupation, the rise of suicide bombings in occupied territories by Hamas and other jihadist groups, again, a response to occupation.
But also the use by Chechens, by Tamils, leading to Robert Pape's study of the rationales for suicide bombings and his conclusion that, look, if this is the reason why people resort to suicide bombings, the simple kind of policy recommendation is end occupation.
If you end occupation, then you will find that suicide bombings as a whole disappear.
Right.
Meanwhile, our government says, oh, suicide bombings are getting worse.
We need another 20,000, another 20,000, another 20,000, another 20,000.
Well, and you know, Robert Pape has made the point, and I think it's in the book, but he definitely has talked about this on this radio show going back to 2005 or something about he likes to compare and contrast Sri Lanka and Sudan.
And he says, you look at the violence in Sri Lanka, you have all this suicide bombing and you have kind of a mix of Hinduism and Buddhism and Marxism and who knows what sort of isms on the different sides.
And you may know much better than I do about the different ethnic divisions and political divisions there.
But nobody is a Muslim extremist or a Muslim of any kind there in Sri Lanka.
And they have suicide bombing, or at least had.
I don't know if that war's really over or what.
But in Sudan, where pretty much everybody, at least in the north and west, are some kind of Sunni, and even though they're Arabs, and even though there's been widespread violence there over the last 10 years, to the tune of hundreds of thousands dead, apparently, no suicide bombing.
And the reason why is simple.
Because even though the others are coming in and killing them, it's basically a fight between nomads and farmers.
It's not an ethnic and religious thing.
And it's not foreigners coming saying, not only am I going to kill you, but I'm going to change the way your child grows up and what he believes in.
That's what people strap bombs to their chest over, you know?
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, you find that this tactic, suicide bombing, has been used by pretty much every religious group, it's been used by different political formations throughout time.
So it's not something that's used by only, say, Islamic fundamentalists today.
And also, the key issue here in terms of occupation, essentially, we're talking about groups that don't have traditional firepower, I mean, they don't have traditional armies, they can resort to very few things to basically fight against occupying forces.
And when it turns out that suicide bombing is no longer an effective technique, if, for instance, the population turns against the guerrilla group, then they will stop using suicide bombing as a tactic.
So it's a tactic that is used only when effective, and only under certain circumstances.
Right, I mean, we saw Hezbollah use them until Israel withdrew from Lebanon, and they haven't used them since then.
I don't even think they use suicide attacks.
Were they in the last war in 2006?
No, no.
So yes, it's a, the way we characterize it, of course, you know, is, is to make it seem as though they are extremists, you know, who will resort to this, you know, just unthinkable tactic.
Whereas we, you know, whether it's the United States or countries that, you know, are part of the Western tradition, you adhere to certain moral precepts when it comes to waging war, we have our Geneva Conventions, you know, we have, you know, various rules governing torture and so forth.
And so we conduct war in a moral fashion, whereas they break the rules.
But in fact, you know, over the last hundred years, we've seen our side, and as well as their side, so to speak, but definitely our side break the rules consistently, whether it was, you know, the deliberate attacks on civilians, or it was, you know, the breaking of the rules on torture with the Bush administration and the ignoring of the Geneva Conventions.
So, you know, our waging war in a moral way versus their immoral way, it breaks down under greater scrutiny.
Yeah, well, I'm no military historian as far as, you know, first generation, second generation, and all these William S. Lynn type things, but it seems like the march to the sea was pretty brutal.
And the Western world's been, you know, basically blowing its own brains out over and over again ever since.
Now we're blowing the brains out of everybody else.
That's right.
It's a bloody history.
Yeah, it really is.
And it's funny, too, because if you think about it, the Civil War was just blowback from the Mexican War.
And then Spain was just a blowback from the Civil War and the Indian War that came after that.
And then, of course, our entry into World War One is just blowback from the war with Spain and on it goes all the way down to the present day.
We had to, you know, destroy that Ottoman Empire.
And, you know, since the end of the Cold War, and certainly since the end of the Gulf Wars, we, as Colin Powell said, have run out of useful enemies.
And Islamic fundamentalists are, of course, the latest enemy.
And, you know...
Was he even being ironic when he said that?
No.
Like, deliberately?
No, I think...
Or he was just complaining out loud, yeah, it's a real bummer, we got to make up a new one.
Yeah, I mean, they got to go in front of Congress to justify increases in military spending.
And you know, how are they going to do that in a peaceful situation?
When you're dealing with enemies that are of significantly lesser caliber than the Soviet Union, I mean, Kim Jong-il doesn't really command very much in terms of defensive capabilities.
What do you say in front of the Pentagon?
However, if you're talking about after September 11th, I mean, September 11th, you know, was an attack on this country.
And you can go in front of Congress and justify all manner of military increases, as well as increases in homeland security.
But you have to consistently play up that threat.
I mean, you know, the fact that there hasn't been an attack since 9-11, it means that you have to say, look, these are a clear and present danger, regardless of what's happened over the last eight years.
Yeah, and all the real...
I believe, and I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that all the real journalists say, you know, if I say, I don't know, you know, Eric Margulies, Bob Dreyfuss, people like that, they say, look, there were maybe 300 friends of Osama at that time.
And the whole thing has basically been obliterated, you know?
Well, you know, to a certain extent, we were a lifeline, you know, extended to al Qaeda when we attacked Afghanistan, but more importantly, when we attacked Iraq, we served as the main kind of recruiting opportunity for that organization.
To the extent that it exists today is the extent to which we've contributed to its sustenance.
All right, everybody, that's Jon Pfeffer.
You can find him at Foreign Policy and Focus, where he's the co-director, and at jonpfeffer.com.
And you can also find him in Tom Englehart's archives, Our Suicide Bombers, at original.antiwar.com slash Englehart, and I'm sure you can also find it at TomDispatch.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, appreciate it.
Thank you.