Their Martyrs and Our Heroes
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6330
John Feffer
August 6, 2009
(Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in TomDispatch on August 6.)
The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his
boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on
earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor.
And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of
that film, Smith clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws
himself at the enemy in a final burst of heroic sacrifice.
Wait a second: Surely that wasn't a suicide bombing. Will Smith
wasn't reciting suras from the Koran. He wasn't sporting one of those
rising sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze wore for their
suicide missions. He wasn't playing a religious fanatic or a
political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how
could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he's one of us, isn't he?
As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. "We" are the
powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern
for individual liberties and individual lives. "We" form a moral
archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel,
present-day Japan, and occasionally Russia. Whether in real war
stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our
lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland,
democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men
weren't expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn't make film
records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have
received just as much praise and recognition as "their" martyrs.
The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of
these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible
things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against
us. According to the popular view, Shiite or Tamil or Chechen suicide
martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.
If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers -- and
our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military
campaigns -- how different can these attitudes really be?
Western Jihad
In America's first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced
the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished
in the incident were among the U.S. military's first missing in action.
It was September 4, 1804. The United States was at war with the
Barbary pirates along the North African coast. The U.S. Navy was
desperate to penetrate the enemy defenses. Commodore Edward Preble,
who headed up the Third Mediterranean Squadron, chose an unusual
stratagem: sending a booby-trapped U.S.S. Intrepid into the bay at
Tripoli, one of the Barbary states of the Ottoman empire, to blow up
as many of the enemy's ships as possible. U.S. sailors packed 10,000
pounds of gunpowder into the boat along with 150 shells.
When Lieutenant Richard Sommers, who commanded the vessel, addressed
his crew on the eve of the mission, a midshipman recorded his words:
"'No man need accompany him, who had not come to the resolution to
blow himself up, rather than be captured; and that such was fully his
own determination!' Three cheers was the only reply. The gallant crew
rose, as a single man, with the resolution yielding up their lives,
sooner than surrender to their enemies: while each stepped forth, and
begged as a favor, that he might be permitted to apply the match!"
The crew of the boat then guided the Intrepid into the bay at night.
So as not to be captured and lose so much valuable gunpowder to the
enemy, they chose to blow themselves up with the boat. The explosion
didn't do much damage -- at most, one Tripolitan ship went down --
but the crew was killed just as surely as the two men who plowed a
ship piled high with explosives into the U.S.S. Cole in the Gulf of
Aden nearly 200 years later.
Despite the failure of the mission, Preble received much praise for
his strategies. "A few brave men have been sacrificed, but they could
not have fallen in a better cause," opined a British navy commander.
The Pope went further: "The American commander, with a small force
and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of
Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christiandom have done
for ages!"
Preble chose his tactic because his American forces were outgunned.
It was a Hail Mary attempt to level the playing field. The bravery of
his men and the reaction of his supporters could be easily transposed
to the present day, when "fanatics" fighting against similar odds beg
to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Islam and garner the praise
of at least some of their religious leaders.
The blowing up of the Intrepid was not the only act of suicidal
heroism in U.S. military history. We routinely celebrate the brave
sacrifices of soldiers who knowingly give up their lives in order to
save their unit or achieve a larger military mission. We commemorate
the sacrifice of the defenders of the Alamo, who could have, after
all, slunk away to save themselves and fight another day. The poetry
of the Civil War is rich in the language of sacrifice. In Phoebe
Cary's poem "Ready" from 1861, a black sailor, "no slavish soul had
he," volunteers for certain death to push a boat to safety.
The heroic sacrifices of the twentieth century are, of course,
commemorated in film. Today, you can buy several videos devoted to
the "suicide missions" of American soldiers.
Our World War II propaganda films -- er, wartime entertainments --
often featured brave soldiers facing certain death. In Flying Tigers
(1942), for example, pilot Woody Jason anticipates the Japanese
kamikaze by several years by flying a plane into a bridge to prevent
a cargo train from reaching the enemy. In Bataan (1943), Robert
Taylor leads a crew of 13 men in what they know will be the suicidal
defense of a critical position against the Japanese. With remarkable
sangfroid, the soldiers keep up the fight as they are picked off one
by one until only Taylor is left. The film ends with him manning a
machine gun against wave upon wave of oncoming Japanese.
Our warrior culture continues to celebrate the heroism of these
larger-than-life figures from World War II by taking real-life
stories and turning them into Hollywood-style entertainments. For his
series of "war stories" on Fox News, for instance, Oliver North
narrates an episode on the Doolittle raid, an all-volunteer mission
to bomb Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since the bombers didn't
have enough fuel to return to their bases, the 80 pilots committed to
what they expected to be a suicide mission. Most of them survived,
miraculously, but they had been prepared for the ultimate sacrifice
-- and that is how they are billed today. "These are the men who
restored the confidence of a shaken nation and changed the course of
the Second World War," the promotional material for the episode
rather grandly reports. Tokyo had the same hopes for its kamikaze
pilots a few years later.
Why Suicide Missions?
America did not, of course, dream up suicide missions. They form a
rich vein in the Western tradition. In the Bible, Samson sacrificed
himself in bringing down the temple on the Philistine leadership,
killing more through his death than he did during his life. The
Spartans, at Thermopylae, faced down the Persians, knowing that the
doomed effort would nevertheless delay the invading army long enough
to give the Athenians time to prepare Greek defenses. In the first
century AD in the Roman province of Judea, Jewish Zealots and
Sicarians ("dagger men") launched suicide missions, mostly against
Jewish moderates, to provoke an uprising against Roman rule.
Later, suicide missions played a key role in European history. "Books
written in the post-9/11 period tend to place suicide bombings only
in the context of Eastern history and limit them to the exotic rebels
against modernism," writes Niccolo Caldararo in an essay on suicide
bombers. "A study of the late 19th century and early 20th would
provide a spate of examples of suicide bombers and assassins in the
heart of Europe." These included various European nationalists,
Russian anarchists, and other early practitioners of terrorism.
Given the plethora of suicide missions in the Western tradition, it
should be difficult to argue that the tactic is unique to Islam or to
fundamentalists. Yet some scholars enjoy constructing a restrictive
genealogy for such missions that connects the Assassin sect (which
went after the great sultan Saladin in the Levant in the twelfth
century) to Muslim suicide guerrillas of the Philippines (first
against the Spanish and then, in the early twentieth century, against
Americans). They take this genealogy all the way up to more recent
suicide campaigns by Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic rebels
in the Russian province of Chechnya. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka,
who used suicide bombers in a profligate fashion, are ordinarily the
only major non-Muslim outlier included in this series.
Uniting our suicide attackers and theirs, however, are the reasons
behind the missions. Three salient common factors stand out. First,
suicidal attacks, including suicide bombings, are a "weapon of the
weak," designed to level the playing field. Second, they are usually
used against an occupying force. And third, they are cheap and often
brutally effective.
We commonly associate suicide missions with terrorists. But states
and their armies, when outnumbered, will also launch such missions
against their enemies, as Preble did against Tripoli or the Japanese
attempted near the end of World War II. To make up for its
technological disadvantages, the Iranian regime sent waves of young
volunteers, some unarmed and some reportedly as young as nine years
old, against the then-U.S.-backed Iraqi army in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
Non-state actors are even more prone to launch suicide missions
against occupying forces. Remove the occupying force, as Robert Pape
argues in his groundbreaking book on suicide bombers, Dying to Win,
and the suicide missions disappear. It is not a stretch, then, to
conclude that we, the occupiers (the United States, Russia, Israel),
through our actions, have played a significant part in fomenting the
very suicide missions that we now find so alien and incomprehensible
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
The archetypal modern suicide bomber first emerged in Lebanon in the
early 1980s, a response to Israel's invasion and occupation of the
country. "The Shiite suicide bomber," writes Mike Davis in his book
on the history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, "was largely a
Frankenstein monster of [Israeli Defense Minister] Ariel Sharon's
deliberate creation." Not only did U.S. and Israeli occupation
policies create the conditions that gave birth to these missions, but
the United States even trained some of the perpetrators. The U.S.
funded Pakistan's intelligence service to run a veritable insurgency
training school that processed 35,000 foreign Muslims to fight the
Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson's War, the book
and movie that celebrated U.S. assistance to the mujihadeen, could be
subtitled: Suicide Bombers We Have Known and Funded.
Finally, the technique "works." Suicide bombers kill 12 times more
people per incident than conventional terrorism, national security
specialist Mohammed Hafez points out. The U.S. military has often
publicized the "precision" of its airborne weaponry, of its "smart"
bombs and missiles. But in truth, suicide bombers are the "smartest"
bombers because they can zero in on their target in a way no missile
can -- from close up -- and so make last-minute corrections for
accuracy. In addition, by blasting themselves to smithereens, suicide
bombers can't give away any information about their organization or
its methods after the act, thus preserving the security of the group.
You can't argue with success, however bloodstained it might be. Only
when the tactic itself becomes less effective or counterproductive,
does it recede into the background, as seems to be the case today
among armed Palestinian groups.
Individual motives for becoming a suicide bomber or attacker have,
when studied, proved to be surprisingly diverse. We tend to ascribe
heroism to our soldiers when, against the odds, they sacrifice
themselves for us, while we assume a glassy-eyed fanaticism on the
part of those who go up against us. But close studies of suicide
bombers suggest that they are generally not crazy, nor -- another
popular explanation -- just acting out of abysmal poverty or economic
desperation (though, as in the case of the sole surviving Mumbai
suicide attacker put on trial in India recently, this seems to have
been the motivation). "Not only do they generally not have economic
problems, but most of the suicide bombers also do not have an
emotional disturbance that prevents them from differentiating between
reality and imagination," writes Anat Berko in her careful analysis
of the topic, The Path to Paradise. Despite suggestions from Iraqi
and U.S. officials that suicide bombers in Iraq have been coerced
into participating in their missions, scholars have yet to record such cases.
Perhaps, however, this reflects a narrow understanding of coercion.
After all, our soldiers are indoctrinated into a culture of heroic
sacrifice just as are the suicide bombers of Hamas. The
indoctrination doesn't always work: scores of U.S. soldiers go AWOL
or join the peace movement just as some suicide bombers give up at
the last minute. But the basic-training techniques of instilling the
instinct to kill, the readiness to follow orders, and a willingness
to sacrifice one's life are part of the warrior ethic everywhere.
Suicide missions are, then, a military technique that armies use when
outmatched and that guerrilla movements use, especially in occupied
countries, to achieve specific objectives. Those who volunteer for
such missions, whether in Iraq today or on board the Intrepid in
1804, are usually placing a larger goal -- liberty, national
self-determination, ethnic or religious survival -- above their own lives.
But wait: surely I'm not equating soldiers going on suicide missions
against other soldiers with terrorists who blow up civilians in a
public place. Indeed, these are two distinct categories. And yet much
has happened in the history of modern warfare -- in which civilians
have increasingly become the victims of combat -- to blur these distinctions.
Terror and Civilians
The conventional picture of today's suicide bomber is a young man or
woman, usually of Arab extraction, who makes a video proclamation of
faith, straps on a vest of high explosives, and detonates him or
herself in a crowded pizzeria, bus, marketplace, mosque, or church.
But we must expand this picture. The September 11th hijackers
targeted high-profile locations, including a military target, the
Pentagon. Hezbollah's suicidal truck driver destroyed the U.S. Marine
barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. soldiers.
Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a female Tamil suicide bomber, assassinated
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
Suicide bombers, in other words, have targeted civilians, military
installations, non-military sites of great significance, and
political leaders. In suicide attacks, Hezbollah, Tamil Tiger, and
Chechen suicide bombers have generally focused on military and police
targets: 88%, 71%, and 61% of the time, respectively. Hamas, on the
other hand, has largely targeted civilians (74% of the time).
Sometimes, in response to public opinion, such movements will shift
focus -- and targets. After a 1996 attack killed 91 civilians and
created a serious image problem, the Tamil Tigers deliberately began
chosing military, police, and government targets for their suicide
attacks. "We don't go after kids in Pizza Hut," one Tiger leader told
researcher Mia Bloom, referring to a Hamas attack on a Sbarro outlet
in Jerusalem that killed 15 civilians in 2001.
We have been conditioned into thinking of suicide bombers as
targeting civilians and so putting themselves beyond the established
conventions of war. As it happens, however, the nature of war has
changed in our time. In the twentieth century, armies began to target
civilians as a way of destroying the will of the population, and so
bringing down the leadership of the enemy country. Japanese
atrocities in China in the 1930s, the Nazi air war against Britain in
World War II, Allied fire bombings of German and Japanese cities, the
nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. carpet bombing
in Cambodia and Laos, and the targeted assassinations of the Phoenix
program during the Vietnam War, Russian depredations in Afghanistan
and Chechnya, the tremendous civilian casualties during the Iraq War:
all this has made the idea of conventional armies clashing in an area
far from civilian life a quaint legacy of the past.
Terrorist attacks against civilians, particularly September 11th,
prompted military historian Caleb Carr to back the Bush
administration's declaration of a war against terror. "War can only
be answered with war," he wrote in his best-selling The Lessons of
Terror. "And it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more
imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything
terrorists can contrive." This more imaginative, decisive, and humane
style of war has, in fact, consisted of stepped-up aerial bombing,
beefed-up Special Forces (to, in part, carry out targeted
assassinations globally), and recently, the widespread use of
unmanned aerial drones like the Predator and the Reaper, both in the
American arsenal and in 24/7 use today over the Pakistani tribal
borderlands. "Predators can become a modern army's answer to the
suicide bomber," Carr wrote.
Carr's argument is revealing. As the U.S. military and Washington see
it, the ideal use of Predator or Reaper drones, armed as they are
with Hellfire missiles, is to pick off terrorist leaders; in other
words, a mirror image of what that Tamil Tiger suicide bomber (who
picked off the Indian prime minister) did somewhat more cost
effectively. According to Carr, such a strategy with our robot planes
is an effective and legitimate military tactic. In reality, though,
such drone attacks regularly result in significant civilian
casualties, usually referred to as "collateral damage." According to
researcher Daniel Byman, the drones kill 10 civilians for every
suspected militant. As Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com writes, "In
Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and
terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no
means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country."
So, the dichotomy between a "just war," or even simply a war of any
sort, and the unjust, brutal targeting of civilians by terrorists has
long been blurring, thanks to the constant civilian casualties that
now result from conventional war-fighting and the narrow military
targets of many terrorist organizations.
Moral Relativism?
We have our suicide bombers -- we call them heroes. We have our
culture of indoctrination -- we call it basic training. We kill
civilians -- we call it collateral damage.
Is this, then, the moral relativism that so outrages conservatives?
Of course not. I've been drawing these comparisons not to excuse the
actions of suicide bombers, but to point out the hypocrisy of our
black-and-white depictions of our noble efforts and their barbarous
acts, of our worthy goals and their despicable ends. We -- the
inhabitants of an archipelago of supposedly enlightened warfare --
have been indoctrinated to view the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a
legitimate military target and September 11th as a heinous crime
against humanity. We have been trained to see acts like the attack in
Tripoli as American heroism and the U.S.S. Cole attack as rank
barbarism. Explosive vests are a sign of extremism; Predator
missiles, of advanced sensibility.
It would be far better if we opened our eyes when it came to our own
world and looked at what we were actually doing. Yes, "they"
sometimes have dismaying cults of sacrifice and martyrdom, but we do
too. And who is to say that ending occupation is any less noble than
making the world free for democracy? Will Smith, in I Am Legend, was
willing to sacrifice himself to end the occupation of vampires. We
should realize that our soldiers in the countries we now occupy may
look no less menacing and unintelligible than those obviously
malevolent, science-fiction creatures. And the presence of our
occupying soldiers sometimes inspires similar, Will Smith-like acts
of desperation and, dare I say it, courage.
The fact is: Were we to end our occupation policies, we would go a
long way toward eliminating "their" suicide bombers. But when and how
will we end our own cult of martyrdom?
--
John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
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