Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Robert Pape has written an excellent book that describes the real reason why there is suicide terrorism. According to Pape suicide terrorism occurs when there is an occupation of the terrorists homeland by a foreign power of a different religion. Pape dismisses the notion that suicide terrorists are proverty stricken loners, because most of the research now indicates that a great percentage of those willing to become suicide terrorists are highly respected members of the middle class in their countries. Pape is also critical of the reasons that stress religious upringing in motivating suicide attacks since Islamic fundamentalists from North Africa and Iran do not commit suicide attacks, but Christian Lebanonese were willing to become suicide bombers for Hezbollah in the eighties. Pape writes that suicide attackers come from states that were under foreign occupation such as Lebanon and who feel colonized by the presence of American troops such as Saudi Arabia. The solution to the problem of suicide terrorism Pape writes is to withdraw military forces from Iraq and Saudi Arabia while offshoring military equippment in case a crisis emerges in the future. With the absence of American presence and greater Homeland security the recruits for suicide terrorism will dry up. Overall, Pape makes a great point that the military strategies used by Bush and Blair which are advocated by scholars such as John Gaddis is heading America for certain defeat unless the American government heeds Pape's advice.

The University of Chicago is an extraordinary institution--the author, employed there, lives up to their reputation for methodical, scholarly, useful reflections grounded firmly in the facts. This work significantly advances our understanding of terrorism and of the three forms of suicidal terrorism: egotistic, altruistic, and fatalistic. The author documents his findings that most suicidal terrorists are altruistic, well-educated, nationalistically-motivated, and fully witting and dedicated to their fatal mission as a service to their community. Of the 563 books I have reviewed--all in national security and global issues, and all but four among the best books in the field--this new work by Professor Pape stands out as startlingly original, thoughtful, useful, and directly relevant to the clear and present danger facing America: an epidemic of suicidal terrorism spawned by the "virtual colonialism" of the US in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and now Iraq as well as other countries. I will not repeat the excellent listing of facts in the Book Description provided by the publisher--certainly that description should be read carefully. If you are a Jewish zealot, don't bother, you will not get over the cognitive dissonance. Everyone else, including Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic contributors to Congressional and Presidential campaign funds, absolutely must read this book. There are many other books that support the author's key premises, all well-documented with case studies and the most complete and compelling statistics--known facts. I am persuaded by the author's big three: 1) Suicidal terrorism correlates best with U.S. military occupation of specific countries that tend to be undemocratic and corrupt, where the U.S. in collusion with dictators and one-party elites are frustrating legitimate national aspirations of the larger underclass and middle class; 2) Virtually all of the suicidal terrorists comes from allies of the U.S. (at least nominally--they actually play the U.S. as "useful idiots") such as Saudi Arabia, rather than Iran; 3) The three premises shared by Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers, and now the Iraqi insurgency, are all accurate and will continue to be so if the U.S. does not pull its military out of the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other locations: a) Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and virtual colonialism everywhere else, demand martyrdom operations; b) Conventional inferiority mandates self-sacrifice (not only suicidal terrorism, but other asymmetric attacks including the death of a thousand cuts against key energy, water, and transportation nodes in the USA; and c) The US and its European allies are vulnerable to coercive pressure. The withdrawal of the Americans and the French from Viet-Nam and then Lebanon, of the Israelis from the West Bank, and other concessions itemized by the author, have all made the case for suicidal terrorism. It works and it will explode. I will mention several

This new work by Robert Pape is a long awaited step forward in the understanding of the phenomenon of suicide terrorism that presently faces the Western world. In it, Pape makes his case in a straightforward and airtight argument based on his study of the global experience of suicide terrorism from 1980-2003. And by no means is this any run-of-the-mill examination. It is by far the most comprehensive, thorough, and methodical look at suicide terrorist attacks, the terrorists themselves, the societies that support them, the democracies that bear their cost, and the political circumstances surrounding them. Pape lays out his ideas in what he terms as the "Nationalism Theory of Suicide Terrorism." One sees, through his analysis, that almost all suicide terrorist attacks since the advent of the tactic have had several similarities. 1) They exist as part of a larger organized campaign 2) they target democracies 3) they seek a strategic political objective (national liberation). This is a cursory explanation of the author's ideas that are elucidated in the book. He then concludes with recommendations stemming from his study's findings. These ideas are simply novel, well thought-out, and groundbreaking. If they do not find wide acceptance in short order they will certainly be the subject of important debate and any future scholarship will be obliged to address them. The author and all those that worked with him did a great job. The concluding prescriptions for future foreign policy decisions are quite reasonable and based on sound footing, but, of course, always debatable. Foreign policy has to be one of the most convoluted and difficult issue areas in any field and it is a matter of dire importance because, unlike in domestic policy, you only get one chance. That is the end of my review. I would like to take a minute to address a previous 1-star review entitled "A Misleading Work" June 6, 2005 by "Anonymous." Though the anonymous reviewer's complaints about the book lacked coherence and organization, though probably not more than their thought process, there seems to be three main issues in Pape's study that they object to: 1) Too much reliance on graphs/statistics, along with statistical errors 2) The LTTE (Tamil Tigers) existing as a statistical outlier 2a) All other suicide terrorist attackers were Muslims 3) Definition of foreign occupation too broad 3a) Al-Qaeda organization does not fit into Pape's model I will briefly show that these objections are faulty. 1) Too much reliance on graphs/statistics, along with statistical errors "Pape provides 14 pages of charts..." The author conducted the largest study of the subject in history and drew his conclusions from the data. It is obviously necessary to use those facts/statistics to present the argument. "...factoring 315 suicide terrorists into a billion people is just foolishness..." There are roughly one billion Muslims in the world, Pape did not use this statistic in his analysis. There we

This is the first really good book on suicide terrorism. The book's immense strength is that it is based on the world's only really good database of suicide terrorist attacks, complete through the end of 2003. Neither DOD nor CIA has equally good data, at least not unclassified. The book is admirably well structured, proceding inexorably from data to theory to conclusions to policy advice. But as another reviewer pointed out, you don't really have to trust the author's conclusions -- the data are all in there, and they speak eloquently by themselves.

Pape's book takes a flinty-eyed look at the data and presents us with inarguable conclusions that many readers will not like. (Witness the ideological hatchet job below, masquerading as a reader review.) If you can't make yourself believe that US foreign policy (and the foreign policies of other powerful democracies) might somehow be a contributing factor in the proliferation of suicide bombing campaigns we are witnessing today, then don't bother reading this book. If you have to let yourself believe that Islam is the source of most suicide bombing in the world, even if the data shows that it isn't, then don't waste your time reading this book. But if you're tired of not understanding why hundreds of billions of dollars of military hardware, intelligence infrastructure and foreign aid, and hundreds of thousands of US soldiers posted overseas, seems only to buy us more suicide bombers, then perhaps you'd be interested in a fresh idea why this is the case. You may not like Pape's conclusions. You may not be happy about them. But you can't deny that they are based on the data, and that his analysis of the data is manifestly non-ideological in the best sense of that term. If we are going to win the war on terrorism, we had better be prepared to stop thinking ideologically from time to time, and take a look at the facts.