[Nat-International] What can terrorists teach us?

[Robert V. Schmidt]

http://www.slate.com/id/2123010/?nav=ais#ContinueArticle

It's Not Who We Are, It's What We Do
What can terrorists teach us?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, July 20, 2005, at 3:49 PM PT

Three new studies, by very different authors taking very different tacks,
reach much the same conclusion about modern terrorism: that its
practitioners, especially its foot soldiers, are motivated not so much by
Islamic fantasies of the caliphate's restoration and the snuffing of
freedom, but rather by resistance to foreign occupation of Arab lands.

Nothing about this conclusion makes terrorist acts more justified, or less
abhorrent, or a slighter assault on the bonds of civilization.
Understanding is not the same as excusing. Still, understanding can be a
useful tool for devising a cogent response and an effective policy.

The most provocative and widely read study is Robert Pape's book Dying to
Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Pape, a military historian
and professor at the University of Chicago, catalogued every terrorist
suicide bombing from 1983 to 2003—in all, 315 attacks carried out by 462
bombers. He concludes that, except for a couple of dozen random incidents,
these bombings were elements of various coordinated campaigns—involving 18
different organizations over a 20-year period—all of which had in common "a
specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw
military forces from the terrorists' national homeland."

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A narrower, but in some ways more revealing, study was published in March
by the Israel-based Global Research in International Affairs Center. (As
far as I know, it has received no U.S. press coverage besides Bryan
Bender's story in the July 17 Boston Globe.) The study's author, Reuven
Paz, researched the backgrounds of 154 foreign Arabs who had died in Iraq
during the previous six months, including 33 who had died in suicide
bombings. (Their names were listed on an Islamist Web site.)

Paz's key finding: "The vast majority of Arabs killed in Iraq have never
taken part in any terrorist activities prior to their arrival in Iraq."

This is consistent with a study commissioned by the Saudi government and
set to be published next month by the conservative Washington-based Center
for Strategic and International Studies. (This study is also described in
Bender's Globe piece.) Its author, Nawaf Obaid, a consultant in London,
researched the backgrounds of about 250 Saudis who went to fight in Iraq.
They included 42 who died, 30 who were turned back at the border by Syrian
authorities, about 150 who are still in Iraq (fighting, captured, or
possibly dead), and another 70 or 80 who are on Pentagon lists of foreign
combatants. Obaid had access to official Saudi interrogations; he and his
assistant also interviewed many of the fighters' families.

Nearly all these Saudis, Obaid told me in a phone interview, were 16- to
25-year-olds, many from prominent families. They watched the destructive
images of the war on Arabic satellite TV, and they read the jihadist Web
sites' urgings to go repel the infidel's occupation. ("Abu Ghraib was just
a disaster," Obaid said, "a resounding call to these kids.")

President George W. Bush frequently depicts the foreign Arabs in Iraq as
comrades of the 9/11 hijackers, enemies of freedom who might be wreaking
havoc here if they weren't fighting over there. Yet if the Arabs in Paz's
and Obaid's studies are typical, Bush's portrait is off the mark. Their
calls to arms may be drenched in Pan-Islamic rhetoric. Those doing the
calling—Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—may have more cataclysmic
ambitions. But the young fanatics on the ground, those streaming across the
Iraqi border, seem motivated more by the classic goals of national
liberation movements.

It's worth noting, in this regard, that Bin Laden himself issued his jihad
against all Americans and infidels—which led to the 9/11 attacks—as a
response to the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil during and after the
1991 Gulf War. Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the 2003 Iraq war,
recognized this. One rationale he gave for invading Baghdad was that for
its own security, the United States needed to withdraw from Saudi Arabia
but that doing so would destabilize the region if Saddam Hussein were left
in power. (He didn't stop to think that the invasion might sink us in a
much deeper occupation, which would lure more terrorists still.)

Again, none of this is to condone al-Qaida's atrocities or to mitigate
their monstrousness. But it does fit with the theory that the alarmingly
widespread fury against the United States these days is directed—as Pape
puts it in his book—not so much at who we are but at what we do.

If that's the case, then what should we do to soften the fury and reduce
the danger? One tempting option might be to end the occupation and pull out
of Iraq as quickly as possible. But this would be unwise, even
counterproductive, on two levels. First, the Iraqi government cannot yet
defend itself from rebellion or invasion; chaotic as the place is now, it
would likely explode and disintegrate without a military presence—and, for
lack of an alternative, that means a U.S. military presence.

Second, though a swift exit might undermine one plank of al-Qaida's
recruitment drive, it would only stiffen another. Bin Laden made clear, in
several declarations and interviews in the '90s, that he was emboldened by
how quickly American presidents withdrew troops from abroad once their
blood began to flow—not just Bill Clinton from Somalia and Haiti (as many
Republicans like to point out) but, more pivotally, Ronald Reagan from
Lebanon.

Those withdrawals were not unreasonable. After a truck-bomber killed 241
Marines in Lebanon, Reagan decided that the U.S. mission simply wasn't
worth further loss of life—and he was right. The problem was that some
observers—including future foes—saw a different lesson in the move, a
lesson that caused us much greater damage two decades later.

The most vital lesson Americans can draw from this sorry saga, in
retrospect, is that we shouldn't initiate foreign adventures unless they
involve interests worth considerable sacrifice. But a more immediate—and
regrettable—lesson is that, having blundered our way into Iraq, we can't
hand these bastards a victory (which is what it would be) by giving in to
their demands. It would only embolden them further the next time our
interests clash.

What we can do, though, is help create a situation that allows us to leave.
A hint of what this might involve is suggested in Reuven Paz's study. Paz
notes that the Arabs who died in Iraq were motivated to fight not just the
Western occupiers but, perhaps more critically, their own sectarian rivals.
Many of the fighters on Paz's list came from the Najd region of Saudi
Arabia, the heart of Wahhabism. Wahhabite Muslims view Shiite Muslims as
infidels. As the majority in Iraq, Shiites are primed to control the new
Baghdad government. As a result, Paz writes, many Saudis have joined the
insurgency to support Iraq's Sunni minority, whom they view "as a community
under attack."

In recent months, it has become a common view—even within the Bush
administration, which once waved off sectarian issues—that Iraq's Sunnis
must be given a share of Iraq's resources and governance, must have a stake
in the new system's future. These three new studies strengthen this view.
They suggest that, until this is accomplished, the insurgency won't be
quelled, political legitimacy won't be established, and Iraq won't be a
sustainable state.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at
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