On Suicide Attacks

It wasn't the intended targets or the number of casualties that struck me about the suicide bombings this week. It was their geographical arc across the Arab world from Morocco to Iraq. In Casablanca, three Moroccans blew themselves up and killed one policeman during a police raid in connection with a March 11 suicide attack at an Internet cafe. In Algiers, an Al Qaeda-affiliated Algerian group claimed responsibility for two suicide attacks on the prime minister's HQ and a police station, killing 33 people. In Baghdad, there was the suicide bombing inside the HQ of Iraq's parliament, which killed an Iraqi MP.

By now we're all too familiar with the phenomenon, largely thanks to Al Qaeda's leaders, who understood the potency of using suicide bombings as global political theater. After staging the most spectacular terrorist attacks in history on 9/11, the group and its imitators kept pace with major followup suicide bombings in Bali, Istanbul, Casablanca, Riyadh, London, Amman and various sites in Iraq. Nonetheless, the breadth of suicide bombings in a single week begs some reflection.

To begin with, there's an understandable but false tendency to see suicide bombings as a uniquely Muslim or Arab phenomenon. Suicide attacks have occurred throughout history, Japan's Kamikaze pilots being a well-known example. Until fairly recently, it was the Tamil Tigers, a secular liberation group with Hindu roots fighting the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government, who deployed the most suicide bombers, 168 between 1980-2000. A little-observed fact is that suicide terrorism was introduced into the Arab-Israeli conflict not by an Islamic fundamentalist but two Christian (and, incidentally, American-trained medical doctors) George Habash and Wadih Haddad. On May 30, 1972, those leaders of the "Marxist" Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine sent a three-man squad of allied Japanese Red Army terrorists to Israel's Lod airport, where they killed 26 people (mostly Puerto Rican pilgrims) in a gun and grenade blitz. Afterwards, the PFLP refrained from using suicide operations as a regular tactic.

Shorn of the cultural psychoanalysis they excite and the moral reproach they invite, Arab suicide attacks are a tactic of asymmetrical warfare employed by groups fighting the more powerful, established conventional forces of perceived existential enemies. Suicide attacks began spreading in the Middle East in the early 1980s, mainly launched by the Shi'ite Muslim Hizballah faction in Lebanon fighting Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. The first attack was on an Israeli military base in Tyre on Nov. 11, 1982, killing 86 people, mainly Israeli soldiers. (The Israeli government was so stunned by the attack that, whether in confusion or by design, it announced that a natural gas explosion had caused the deaths.) Later, Hizballah is believed to have carried out the April 18, 1983 attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the Oct. 23, 1983 attacks on the U.S. Marines and French paratroopers barracks in Beirut. Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago estimates that between 1982-86, Hizballah carried out 41 suicide attacks yet only eight of the bombers were Islamic fundamentalists; three were Christians, including a woman high school teacher. What they shared, Pape says, "was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting foreign occupation." Using "martyrdom operations" as a successful battlefield tactic and propaganda tool, Hizballah was largely responsible for the eventual withdrawal of Western and Israeli forces from Lebanon by 2000.

It is difficult to discern the exact cause and effect, but Hizballah's success in driving Israelis out of Lebanon influenced other non-Shi'ite Islamic groups to begin thinking about launching suicide attacks. Although Palestinian guerrillas began taking up arms against Israel in 1965, it was not until 1993 that one faction, Hamas, a Sunni group, adopted suicide attacks as a major tactic. Its more than 70 suicide operations from 1993-present have helped ditch the Oslo peace accords and boosted Hamas's popularity to the point that the group won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections. Bin Laden is said to have been profoundly impressed by Hizballah's operations, and his mentor in jihad was a Palestinian with close ties to Hamas. Bin Laden & Co.'s first suicide operations, attacks on two American embassies in Africa on August 7, 1998, came on the heels of Hamas's first major suicide bombing spree in 1996-97.

Say what you want about the Iraq war, but it is indisputable that it opened the mother of Pandora's Boxes. By some counts, about 700 suicide attacks have already taken place in the span of four years. That is not only Al Qaeda at work, suggesting that post-Saddam Iraq has become a veritable factory for churning out suicide bombers. If, as seems likely, Iraq becomes a failed state and a place where future Bin Ladens will continue to refine their craft, perhaps we have only begun to see the true global threat posed by suicide attackers.

What can be done? The Bush administration is correct when it says that the "war on terrorism" will be a long one. It's also right in saying that extremism has been fueled in part by the lack of openness in the Middle East. But the tendency to use force in addressing the many problems in the region--rather than emphasizing tools like diplomacy, cross-cultural understanding and genuine support for freedom--has made the situation worse. It's probably no coincidence that the periods witnessing the steepest rise in suicide attacks in the Middle East--1982-86 in Lebanon, and 2003-2007 in Iraq--coincided with intense and prolonged foreign military operations in Arab lands. Estimates have put the Iraq war cost to date at some $500 billion. Imagine how the political atmosphere might change for the better if that sum were put to use helping Palestinians build the independent state that they demand and the Bush administration says they deserve.

-By Scott MacLeod/Cairo