All right, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Professor Robert A. Pape from the University of Chicago.
He's the author of the book, Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, which I first interviewed him back in 2005 about that, and I think that was probably the best interview on that book in terms of substance, time spent going through each and every little bit of it.
But also, I could just recommend you go look at the Wikipedia page for Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and it's a very good outline of that book.
And now there's a brand new one out, Cutting the Fuse, The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It, co-authored with James K. Feldman.
Welcome to the show, Bob, how are you?
Great, thanks for having me on, Scott.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today, and also, by the way, I could recommend everyone go to antiwar.com, look at the viewpoint section today, and you'll see a link there to Bob's article at foreignpolicy.com.
It's the occupation, stupid.
Go ahead and hit them.
Well, in the year 2000, Scott, we had 20 suicide attacks around the world.
One of those, against the coal, was anti-American.
In the last 10 years, we've been waging a war on terror, and I want to say a so-called war on terror, and what's the result?
In the last 12 months, we've had 300 suicide attacks around the world.
270 of those suicide attacks are anti-American inspired.
This is not a war against terrorism, this is a war provoking terrorism.
The reason that we have such a level of fear in our country that can be easily touched off.
A week ago, there were alerts of new soft target attacks by Al-Qaeda in Europe.
A month ago, we had a consternation over the mosque in New York.
A year ago, we had a giant flap over sending troops to Afghanistan.
What's happening in all these cases is that there really is an undercurrent of fear in our country.
There really is a concern about the war on terror, and there's good reason.
The war on terror is not ending terror.
It's doing more to scare Americans than it is to scare the terrorists.
All right.
Now, people, you might clue into the way Robert Pape talks here, citing all these numbers and everything.
This is really the form of your argument has been to show, in that social science sense, with numbers and facts and reason and not anecdotal evidence and estimations, but really trying to nail down and, I guess we can't call it prove, but show what causation belongs to which correlation here to people.
You're right, Scott.
What's special about the way I've approached the topic is I treat suicide terrorism the way a medical researcher might treat lung cancer.
And you see, suicide terrorism is the lung cancer of terrorism.
It's the most deadly form.
Suicide terrorist attacks kill far more people than ordinary terrorism attacks.
Without the element of suicide on 9-11, the terrorists could never have killed 3,000 people.
And like lung cancer, suicide terrorism has specific risk factors.
Those risk factors really jump right out at you when you collect information around the world about who gets suicide terrorism and who doesn't get suicide terrorism, a lot the way we did in the 1940s and 50s when we did the original research to figure out the actual causes of lung cancer.
You see, a lot of people think that terrorists, there must be something like genetically wrong with people who become terrorists, that they're predisposed.
And the truth is psychologists and sociologists have been searching.
Well, that is kind of true.
Young males, right?
Right.
There's something.
Well, what's been going on is that for the last, gosh, 10 years now, there's been this effort to try to figure out the kind of, let's call it genetic code of what makes someone a terrorist.
But the fact of the matter is it's very, very similar to trying to figure out the genetic code of who gets lung cancer.
Well, someday we may figure that out.
We haven't figured out the genetic code of lung cancer, by the way, of who's susceptible to it.
But what we did figure out is that smoking is the trigger to lung cancer.
Well, what triggers suicide terrorism, far more than anything else, almost 95% of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world for the last 30 years, that is of the 2,200 suicide terrorist attacks around the world, over 2,000 are directly a result of one thing.
That one thing is foreign military occupation.
That is, stationing large military forces overseas on territory that terrorists prize.
That's why al-Qaeda originally did the 9-11 attacks.
They recruited individuals from the Arabian Peninsula who, in the 1990s, were deeply angered at the presence of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.
I don't mean advisers with sidearms, I mean tanks, fighter aircraft, and armored units, something that we didn't do going all the way back to World War II until 1990.
Well, that anger, that presence created anger, enough anger for 19 hijackers to ram planes into buildings on 9-11.
And then what happened in our war on terror, the so-called war on terror?
What did we do to respond?
We poured large numbers of ground troops into Iraq.
That exploded suicide terrorism in Iraq.
In Afghanistan, for the first few years, we actually didn't put many troops in Afghanistan.
And then what did we do?
We started to pour troops into Afghanistan.
And that started in 2006.
And what have we seen in the last four years since 2006 in Afghanistan?
Suicide attacks exploding in Afghanistan.
Well, that's simply a result of the fact that nothing triggers terrorists to do suicide attacks more than foreign forces on territory that they prize.
All right, well, here's an anecdote.
I mentioned this on the show just before the last break.
Times Square Bomber Caused an Effect in the War on Terror by Glenn Greenwald.
This is quoting from a Washington Post report about the sentencing of the attempted Times Square Bomber.
If the United States does not get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries controlled by Muslims, or not controlled by them, he said, we will be attacking the U.S., adding that Americans only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.
One of the first things he said was, how do you feel if people attack the United States?
You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan.
That was what he said when they arrested him.
Scott, that is exactly right about the Times Square Bomber.
And that little story could be told over and over again, as we do in the new book, Cutting the Fuse, about, say, the London suicide bombers in July 2005.
Because we actually have their martyr videos.
You see, the day of the attacks, when the actual attacks occur, we typically don't know much about the motives of the individuals doing attacks.
But afterwards, we actually can find out information.
In the case of the Times Square Bomber, we arrest the guy, and he tells us.
In the case of the other suicide attackers, we have martyr videos that they leave behind, where they actually just reveal directly their motives, because they're actually trying to often explain to their families and close friends why they're doing this.
And over and over and over again, we find it's the presence of our combat forces in Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, and this explains why the more we've put troops in, the more we've gotten suicide terrorism, and the more we've taken troops out, the less we've gotten suicide terrorism.
Look at Iraq today.
The last two years, we've pulled out over 100,000 ground troops for Iraq, and what's happened to suicide terrorism?
It's down 85%.
Now, just remember, Scott, just a few years ago, when folks like you and me were calling for pulling out those troops from Iraq, what was the big argument against us?
Al-Qaeda will take over the whole place if we do.
That's what's happened.
We're putting Al-Qaeda out of business.
Well, and you know, I'm really sorry that you haven't won this argument, Bob, because you've been trying and really doing, you've made the most convincing case to the obvious point this whole time.
But the key is that history did not begin on September 11th.
It's not that this terrible evil came out of the clear blue sky, and then, yeah, we've created more harm than good maybe with our policy, but we had to go and kill these bad guys.
We had to do something, this, that, the other.
But in truth, the Fatwa of 96 and of 98 were both titled Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri gave interviews to CNN repeatedly and explained over and over again, your children's blood is blood, but our children's blood is water.
We're going to show you.
Well, you know what, Scott?
That's all true, but there's one difference in the last few years.
We're actually making progress with this argument.
So for the last few years, up until just a few years ago, there were a few of us in the wilderness, essentially, trying to explain this phenomenon and showing the link with foreign occupation.
What's happened in the last few years is that this is now just beginning, and I say just beginning, to move into the political mainstream.
If your listeners will go on the CPOST website, our Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, you will see, or if you just Google, you'll see that a week ago, on October 12, we had a huge conference on Capitol Hill.
I don't mean in Washington.
I mean on Capitol Hill, with 300 people.
You can watch the tape of that conference on C-SPAN.
The conference was called Cutting the Fuse, after our book.
We gave away 300 copies of our book to many members of Congress, and we had a congressman, Brian Baird, introducing our conference.
We had the head of the 9-11 Commission, Governor Thomas Kaine, at our conference as a keynote speaker.
We had the head of the Navy, I mean the top person in the Navy, Admiral Gary Roughead, as a keynote speaker at our conference.
This is now beginning, for the first time, to move to the mainstream.
And why is that the case?
It's the case because the data, that issue of the data that I've been talking about on your program, is now getting richer and more robust, and the stronger the linkage, the more data we have, the more the linkage is absolutely apparent to all but the most diehard on the other side, that there's a strong linkage between foreign occupation and suicide attack, just like with smoking and lung cancer.
We don't think smoking and lung cancer, that linkage is a political argument anymore, when we used to in the 40s and 50s.
Now, we take that as an empirical connection, a fact.
That's what's beginning to actually happen in Washington.
What would help the cause, what would help the movement, is more public education.
And the best way to do that is to learn more about the actual data and the linkage, which is why we did the new book, Cutting the Fuse.
Now, go ahead and plug the book, because clearly Dying to Win, I promise everyone here, Dying to Win is cover-to-cover reading.
You've got to do it.
Tell me about how this is different and better, other than just updated.
In Dying to Win, we looked at suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, and that was 300 suicide attacks.
Since 2003, we've had over 1,800 more suicide attacks.
We could have easily blown away.
That's the whole book right there.
And what's powerful about this is that there are even more, not just 95%.
Now it's 97% of that much greater number, foreign occupation, and triggered explicitly by the onset of that foreign occupation.
And this is now information that is so powerful and so credible that we have highly important members of the establishment, again, the heads of the 9-11 Commission, Nobel Prize winners, the top admiral in the Navy actually reading this, looking at the data, having their staffs look at this, try to pull this apart.
And these are people who are not prone to agree with this, to say the least.
These are people who are coming to it with a skeptical eye, and nonetheless, they are finding it incredibly impressive.
And that's what's so important about the new book.
The new book isn't just an argument.
It's just not another voice in the wilderness.
Again, it's showing this powerful connection, like smoking and lung cancer, connection which even real skeptics would have to at least look twice at to say, my gosh, is it really that close of a connection?
Well, that's a way to actually begin the movement to move beyond the war on terror.
Sure, and the whole thing is, too, is that it just shows right there implicitly that, oh, it wasn't Islam at all.
People with political motives want to say that it's Islam because they want an excuse for more war.
And really, in a way, Bob, your book, if it was done for the military, could simply be how to guarantee a long war, how to continue to make enemies to fight, how to justify invading Kazakhstan next.
There's a lot of truth to what you say, Scott, and what I'm trying to tell you is that even folks who start with those priors, who start from those positions, you show them the information in Cutting the Fuse.
If listeners would just simply get a copy of Cutting the Fuse and send it to the biggest skeptic, that is, the people who most believe in the war on terror, who most believe it's Islamic fundamentalism, I'll tell you, it would be very, very interesting to see how far this movement could spread.
Right on.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your work.
I can't wait to get the book, and we'll do this interview again in detail.
But I really do appreciate it.
Everybody go look at Foreign Policy.
It's the occupation, stupid.
You can find the link at antiwar.com today.
And again, the book is at Amazon.com right now, Cutting the Fuse, the Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
Thanks very much.
Thanks so much, Scott.
