Political scientist has completed a detailed examination of what drives people to suicide attacks

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/02/AR2007090201039.html

The Insurgency's Psychological Component

By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, September 3, 2007; Page A03

<snip>One of the most prominent advocates of this position is the political scientist Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. Increasing troops in Iraq, Pape argues, will win the United States a lot of battles with insurgents but also make it more likely that Americans will lose the war.

Pape's conclusions are based on a detailed examination of suicide attacks over the past 25 years. His central finding is that, contrary to conventional explanations, suicide attacks follow a certain strategic logic. From 1980 to 2006, Pape has counted 870 completed suicide attacks -- with the Iraqi insurgency accounting for the majority of such attacks in recent years.

Of the total, Pape has found that 824 of the attacks, or 95 percent, have come from groups that are fighting against military occupations of their homeland. Pape found that 85 percent of all the suicide attacks in the last quarter-century have come about in response to U.S. combat operations. There were eight times as many suicide attacks in Iraq in 2006 as there were in 2003.

While suicide attacks account for only a part of the overall Iraqi insurgency, Pape argues that these attacks provide the most reliable measure of the state of the insurgency. Furthermore, they are among the deadliest sources of mayhem in Iraq today. Every case that Pape counts has been corroborated by at least two independent sources. Pape's figures are considered so rigorous that U.S. government officials now use his database, and he gets funding from the Defense Department.

"If you look at the chart {of suicide attacks} from 2004 to 2006, you see Iraq and Afghanistan exploding," Pape said. "American combat operations are directly associated with suicide terrorism. There was no suicide terrorism, and we go in and now there is suicide terrorism."

[notadmblnd]

1. I've always suspected that many "suicide attacks" aren't really

suicide attacks. I suspect that often, people are abducted and forced to become walking IEDs.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. A theory without any substantial evidence to back it up.

You should google Robert Pape and the research he has done. Our misconceptions about who suicide terrorists are, what their objecvives and motivations are, and how effective they are, are widespread.

http://danieldrezner.com/research/guest/Pape1.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_to_Win:_The_Strategic_Logic_of_Suicide_Terrorism

[notadmblnd]

5. you're absolutely right about the lack of evidence

Suicide attackers don't usually live to tell their stories.

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Actually they do quite frequently.

Which is why you should do the research. They have friends and families. They are rarely 'fanatic loners'. Their suicide attack may be a celebrated event within the community. It is somehow more comforting for us to imagine that they are all fundamentalist loons or tied down to the truck (that they then attempt to steer precisely to the target) or anything that avoids the conclusion that this is a rational and effective response to an otherwise militarily insurmountable problem.

[notadmblnd]

8. Really?

I found this recent article. I'm not saying the guy wasn't a willing participant but the article states that he is probably the first suicide attacker to survive. Do you have any links to stories about more survivors you could link to?

‘Instruments of Death’
A Saudi bomber who lived to tell his tale is back home denouncing jihad.

By Rod Nordland
Newsweek

Aug. 5, 2007 - The story of Ahmed Abdullah al-Shayea sounds like a fairy tale, and not a very pleasant one. Recruited as a jihadi in the conservative Saudi town of Buraida as a 19-year-old, he volunteered to go to Iraq as a fighter. Once there, he balked when insurgents — including Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Mussab al Zarqawi himself — tried to persuade him to become a suicide bomber. So instead, he claims, they told him his mission was to drive a huge fuel truck—with no truck-driving experience at all—through Baghdad neighborhoods—with which he had no familiarity whatever—and drop it off at the Saddam Towers. It was Christmas Day, 2004. Two other militants rode with him, but jumped out suddenly, leaving him alone. A less guileless person might have taken that as a sign, but al Shayea carried on driving toward his destination.

Now 22, Shayea may yet have a life. The Saudi program holds out the promise of release, with jobs and help in finding a wife, for jihadis who are judged truly repentant. If Shayea qualifies, as he is on course to do, he will probably be the first suicide (or is it "homicide") bomber to survive his own detonation and win his freedom.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20114312/site/newsweek/ full story

on edit: I did find this line frome a different site

"11. The ‘making of a martyr’ symbol for jihad is absent in Bangladesh for most ‘suicide bombers’ usually survive their attacks and are often too maimed for anybody to take their death bed ‘confessions’ seriously. "

but the writer doesn't cite his work.

http://www.globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=1463&cid=6&sid=20

Just trying to do the research, so I can make a more informed decision.

[Warren Stupidity]

10. I am not saying there are no cases where people were coerced.

What I am saying is that Pape's study is pretty much the only academic study one out there in the public domain getting peer reviewed and it is extensive (he is up to 850 or so cases) and it does not back a claim that most or many of the attacks are by people tied down and forced to do what they are doing.

[notadmblnd]

11. and I didn't claim most were forced. I said many.

Certainly it stands to reason that there are people out there whose situations are so bleak and are so blinded my religion that they no longer value their lives. But I also believe that the human instinct to survive is one or our strongest.

[Warren Stupidity]

12. It ain't 'many' either.

'some' is probably correct. But that is almost beside the point, the really startling information in Pape's study is that characterizing suicide bombers as typically 'in bleak situations' or 'blinded by religion' is to completely misconstrue the situation. Religious fanaticism and economic hardship do not typify the suicide bomber. I know that this is difficult to accept (particularly the religious fanaticism) but that is what Pape's data shows. Pape has been attacked from the right for just this reason: the data he has collected does not fit within the common perception of the conflict we are in. If suicide bombers are simply trying to use the only effective means they have at their disposal to attack what they view as an unjust occupying force, all the arguments for staying in Iraq currently in vogue over on the right fall apart. We are not fighting terrorism in Iraq, we are not preventing terrorism from spreading, we created an insurgency against an unjust occupation and that insurgency is using the only effective military tactic it has against our occupation. If we leave, the suicide bombings will very likely stop. (Of course the sectarian conflict will continue until it resolves itself, but it is unlikely to use suicide bombers as a tactic.)

[BlooInBloo]

13. Heh! You fell for it - "many" can mean ANYTHING the speaker wants it to...

... it's completely unfalsifiable. Of course, that alethic security comes at the cost of an utterly empty statement, but that's good enough for DUers.

Ah - Gotta love the anti-intellectualist-empirical-research-be-damned DUers.

[Warren Stupidity]

14. I accepted that risk and assumed the common meaning.

I'm more interested in getting Pape's studies out in the internets, as the data is so completely jarring, than in the rhetorical tactics of endless blather. But your point is well taken.

[BlooInBloo]

15. Fair enough.

[Usrename]

18. I've read several stories that there were false flag ops in Iraq.

People would be stopped at checkpoints and removed from their cars for interrogation for several hours, during which time explosives were surreptitiously installed in their car. When the folks were finally released, they would be instructed to go immediately to the police station, where the hidden explosives would go off. Over time, a few of these drivers noticed something wrong with their cars and stopped to investigate what was in the trunk. There were at least several instances where the explosives were found before they were detonated. This all happenend back a couple years ago when the police stations were being targeted every day. Sorry I don't have a link, but perhaps someone else here will remember what I'm talking about. The stories appeared in the international press, IIRC.

[bobbolink]

17. "more comforting for us to imagine that they are all fundamentalist loons"

Yes, indeed.

Shades of USSR----if you strongly disagree with reigning power, you MUST be crazy.

Or, if you see truth and can no longer live with it, you MUST be crazy.

Same with suicide in this country. It couldn't possibly be that life becomes too harsh for some. No, they MUST be crazy.

Good way to keep ourselves distanced, and "safe".

[many a good man]

20. Their instructors don't live to tell about it either

[alteredstate]

2. k & r n/t

[lonestarnot]

4. a rare examination of root cause. Thanks.

[Frogger]

7. Did he mention

extreme religious fundamentalism? True belief in an afterlife? The belief that all the world must submit to distored visions of morality?

[upi402]

9. religion

and mankinds abuse of power.


Now where's my payday?

[TreasonousBastard]

16. Interesting. I haven't read...

any of Pape's work, but it looks like he's discovered that suicide bombers have a lot in common with military "suicide" missions, which makes a lot of sense.

The defenders of the Alamo, Horatio at the bridge, attackers of Pork Chop Hill, the first wave of Chinese infantry not supplied with weapons, Pickett's charge, Kamikaze pilots...

Military missions are always dangerous, but some are suicidal albeit necessary (or stupid, as in Pickett). The volunteers, or those simply following orders into the maelstrom, are motivated simply by their understanding of their duty. It stands to reason that many of these "civilian" suicide bombers are seeing in themselves the fulfilling of some duty to their conmrades. They do, as far as I know, undergo similar brainwashing to what the Kamikaze pilots went through, but before actually signing up, so it's difficult to tell just how voluntarily they go into these missions.

As with the military, these suicide missions are still measures of desperation and last resort when nothing else seems possible.

[ConsAreLiars]

19. Quite right. "Even" American mythology celebrates those who give

up their lives in defense of their family/tribe/nation or to defend against "the enemy." Suicide bombers are less different than some WWII soldier who charges an enemy machine gun site than many are willing to acknowledge.

[Elspeth]

21. "95 percent have come from groups that are fighting against military occupations of their homeland."

We needed a study to tell us that suicide attacks are almost always done by desperate people trying to save what little they have. Hmmm....

[bemildred]

22. Re-confirming the already many-times confirmed result.

People will readily die to defend their societies. Suicide attacks are just one way to go about it. It has nothing to do with religion.