Unfortunately I missed the first episode The Power of Nightmares last night as I fell under the beery spell of several other bloggers.
Reading Mark’s post it is worth revisiting another documentary regarding terrorism and that is The Cult of The Suicide Bomber. This was shown a few weeks ago on the ABC and I don’t think much mention of it was made in the Australian blogosphere which is a shame. It is a documentary worth reviewing on this unfortunately all too common weapon of terror.
The documentary is narrated by Robert Baer, an ex-CIA officer who was stationed in the Middle East. He was in Beirut when a car bomber destroyed the Marine barracks and an the American embassy back in the early 1980s. As Baer states his
I lost several colleagues in those explosions and although I’ve now left the CIA, at the time, I vowed to make it my life’s mission to find out who did it and why and where the cult of suicide bombing started.
Baer does this by going back to the Iran-Iraq war. Hossein Fahmeidh is allegedly the first suicide bomber. He threw himself under an Iraqi tank and detonated explosives destroying the tank and halting an Iraqi advance. From then on acult of martyrdom developed and suicide bombing was encouraged as a weapon of war by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Hossein Fahmeidh’s act is not a new tactic in war. Suicide bombing is a tactic of asymmetric warfare. When one side is at a distinct disadvantage in terms of weapons and forces suicide tactics are not uncommon. The Japanese Imperial forces in World War II developed quite a range of suicide tactics other than the infamous Kamikaze missions. Soldiers throwing themselves under tanks and detonating explosives was one such tactic.
The interesting aspect of the Iranian use of suicide bombers is that this developed in the context of the Shi’a sect of Islam. This was also apparent in Lebanon where the Shi’a Muslims used suicide bombing against the Israeli forces. The spread of suicide bombing to the Sunni sect was an interesting development. Baer regards the idea of martyrdom as alien to the Sunni sect. However the use of suicide bombing by Palestinians against the Israelis legitimized suicide bombing for the majority of Muslims.
The strength of Baer’s documentary is how he is able to touch on how suicide bombing affects both sides in a conflict. The interviews with the families of Palestinian suicide bombers are quite revealing. As well he interviews Israeli survivors of suicide bombings as well as bombers who were caught before they could detonate their explosives. Baer is obviously horrified by the escalation of suicide bombing in the Middle East. Howerever the way in which he opens the documentary up to both sides, without judgement, allows a greater understanding of the threat and the greatly different interpretations of the acts of the suicide bombers.
It has been argued that those who organize the suicide missions prey on the troubled or even mentally retarded. Indeed the mother of Lotfi Amin Abu Saada, the most recent Palestinian suicide bomber suggested this was the case. While this may some times may be true it is in contrast the pride that the family of the bombers show in the interviews. Further evidence against this argument (that suicide bombers are manipulated into their acts) is the case of the British born Palestinian suicide bombers. And then there is Muriel Degauque, the Belgian suicide bomber.
Btw, Tim Dunlop has a link to an interesting article on the growing ranks of female suicide bombers.
In context of asymmetrical warfare the use of suicide bombing is understandable though desperate tactic. The disturbing aspect of Baer’s documentary is how suicide bombing is being enacted outside warfare and its use against civilian targets. The nature of the Muslim again Muslim violence in Iraq is evident of this. It has become a ‘pathological virus’ (as Baer puts it) which is a disturbing development. Baer also points out that the irony is that most of the Iraqi victims are Shi’a Muslims.
The Cult of The Suicide Bomber succeeds well in outlining the history of suicide bombing in the Middle East and providing a context for understanding. However suicide bombing has evolved beyond the usual confines. The act has now become the goal with no real attachment to a cause. As Baer states in conclusion
In the latest mutation suicide bombing has lost any attachment to a cause. The bombers target is not an opressor or an occupying army. There is no apparent meaning to what they had done. For them death is the only aim. In its latest and most disturbing development suicide bombing has turned into a weapon of chaos.
Crossposted at The 52nd State
I guess if you are 22, a virgin and not too bright becaause the entire family line going back 10 generations were first cousins and the local mullah tells says paradise means you are gunna bag 72 virgins who look like the baywatch gals, who wouldn’t be enticed to wrap up a strap on.
Mark.
Can I run the weekend slyvia gig I picked up on Beautiful A….. Please!!!! I’m, sure not everyone read it.
Joe,
I suggest that you watch the documentary. While the idea of martydom was strong the notion of doing it for the promise if virgins was rarely mentioned (if it was mentioned at all). The reality seems far more complex than the stereotype.
And if that was the case how do you explain Muriel Degauque or the Black Widows in Chechnya?
I tell you what – The Power of Nightmares has nearly convinced me of the error of my ways. I’ve always discounted the neocons as but the useful and fevered idiots of the realists who just wanted to make sure the oil regions don’t slip out of control – it is an excellent insight into the darkest recesses of the mind of those Straussian Apostles who declare jihad in the name of Liberty – despite committing the cardinal doco sin of using the Space Odyssey/Zarathustra soundtrack at one point. (AC/DC would have served better given the subject matter.)
And heaps of footage I’d never seen before.
Shaun:
I did watch another similar type that was on HBO US a few years back. Wonder if it’s the same one.
Shaun, I really am not trying to sound obnoxious about this towards you in any way because the stuff you write is an interesting read as you are quite talented. So please did think I am directing anything negative toward you.
I simply have not a second of anything for those who kill innocent people like this. Hey, they want to go after military in this way, it’s their bag. But to see pics of little kids in pieces gets my goat. One of the ways we can get back at them is to ridicule everything about them: their looks, their families, their foaming and their eyes being close together.
You said:
… notion of doing it for the promise if virgins was rarely mentioned (if it was mentioned at all). The reality seems far more complex than the stereotype.
But how could we know. We can‚Äôt exactly interview them after the crime. I wouldn‚Äôt take much of what they say beforehand because the local mullah has scripted what’s to be said as I saw in the doco I watched. However a surviving strapper, one who was really too stupid to pull the right cord told the interviewer that his family talked him into it so they could get 25g when he went off to get the gals.
“And if that was the case how do you explain Muriel Degauque or the Black Widows in Chechnya?”
Who knows about these monsters? I would dare say they resemble those creeps who kill their families before taking their own lives.
“One of the ways we can get back at them is to ridicule everything about them: their looks, their etc”
Their looks. Hmmm, usually they look to be in little pieces by that stage. If that’s our best shot then we got away to go.
But your right, Joe. Who’s got the stomach to discuss this further. Let’s just laugh in the face of terror.
Joe,
I don’t disagree though that some of the motives for the suicide bombers are stupid or they are manipulated. But Baer does interview some bombers that were captured and they tell a different story. In the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict there are obvious ideological reasons.
It is also interesting where it talks about the secular suicide bombers from the SNPP back in Lebanon during the 80s. They were politically motivated. The biggest danger is for us to impose our motivations on the suicide bombers. That does not help in trying to actually understand the real motivations and if there is anything we can do to combat the issue.
Ridiculing the suicide bombers does not achieve anything. I bet it doesn’t rankle the suicide bombers one little bit. The problem is that suicide bombing is now beyond a cause. It is an end in itself that seems to have no meaning. This makes it even more terrifying.
This documentary is recent as it does talk about the London bombings.
How will you ridicule the suicide bomber? When did you last see one?
I hope you survive if you should – most likely you never will, except on TV. Like the last 50 years.
I only saw the first 8 minutes of Robert Bear’s film (it’s not on Google any more). It’s from a CIA man’s perspective – not surprisingly he fails to mention the CIA’s role in Iran. I can’t say what else he omitted, but you can’t get the full picture without the politicals.
There’s an interesting documentary about the Weathermen on Google – the American guys who bombed public and army buildings to stop the Vietnam war (and killed nobody). They originally planned to blow up the people with the buildings because in their view, doing nothing was a way to aid the killers – there “were no innocents any more”. That is the mindset of terrorists and suicide bombers, and a lot closer to us as Westerners who generally don’t have firsthand experience about the middle east or militant muslims, except as tourists, if that. With a new unjustified war in Iraq now, all that is suddenly up to date again, just when the media had dismissed the 70’s movement as a bunch of nuts.
Suicide bombing isn’t without a cause, make no a mistake about that. It’s maybe “fashionable”. But as long as someone thinks it’s justified, there is definitely a cause.
Joe says
“I simply have not a second of anything for those who kill innocent people like this. Hey, they want to go after military in this way, it���s their bag. But to see pics of little kids in pieces gets my goat.”
As if suicide bombers had a monopoly of blowing kids into little pieces – I would think, given the tactics (and weaponry used) by the COW, that they would be responsible for as many, if not more of such acts as bastardry as have all of the suicide bombers – I still remember the terrible picture of a young Vietnamese girl with her back on fire from napalm, which was certainly not used by a suicide bomber, or even a “commie rat”, but by the Amerikan war machine.
I just hope it gets your goat as much when Israeli soldiers shoot children, or the soldiers of the COW “pacify” another Iraqui city or district. otherwise I would suspect that your comment displays more than a degree of partisanship.
Personally, I am against these “wars of convenience” as the Iraqui adventure has always been, and don’t think it remarkable in any way that suicide bombing has become an aspect of such assymetric warfare, nor do I think it any more (or less) reprehensible which party slaughters non – combatants.
I have to agree with Astrid, in that,
“Suicide bombing isn’t without a cause, make no a mistake about that. “
Currently, the most active SBs are anti-Shiites in Iraq. They blow up civilian targets.
I’m not aware of many SBs in action against US forces. Overwhelmingly, Americans are killed by sniper fire or by IEDs.
Thus, there seems to be a division of labour in the killing business.
This probably reflects a division of responsibility.
Al Qaeda and indigenous Sunni jihadists are set to the task of fomenting civil war between Sunni and Shiite. The SB is an effective weapon here because Shiites assemble in public in large numbers. (Sunni can’t do that any more in Baghdad.)
Sunni nationalists, on the other hand, devote themselves to the military arts of wearing down US military resolve. That involves making US troops feel vulnerable whenever they venture out in public.
It is a moot question as to how much co-operation there is between these two elements of the Sunni insurgency.
Yet it is remarkable that there does appear to be a demarcation of tasks.
Tactically, these two groups are pursuing contradictory policies. Sunni nationalists want the US out immediately. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, while they want the ultimate defeat and humiliation of the US, encourage the US to stay on a little longer to cop more punishment. Al Qaeda have concluded that the existence of civil war in Iraq now serves as a further justification for the US to tarry there. It would be interesting to know whether these tactical differences cause major tensions between Sunni nationalists and Al Qaeda.
Thus, it would appear to me that this division of labour is quite efficient. The question arises about the sources of recruitment for the SBs. Initially, it would seem, many of them were foreigners. But as time has gone on more of them appear to be Iraqi. Thus the practice of SB has itself become naturalised in Iraq. Recruitment would appear to be driven by a desire to provoke and pursue civil war against Shiites.
Thus it is legitimate to conclude that since Bush’s invasion of Iraq, suicide bombing has evolved from a tactic most directly associated with Shiite and non-Iraqi jihadis to become the weapon of opportunity for Iraqi Sunni. This is an indicatiion of the failure of the Bush mission.
Interesting, Katz.
I’ve always wondered about these suicide bombers in Iraq. It’s frustrating that there is little or no journalism on the people doing this. Who they were, where they came from. What their mum and dad have got to say.
It’s very hard to get a grasp of their motives beyond such as your own worthy macro analysis.
Of course rwdbs will scorn any attempt to “understand” a SB outright. I wonder if the US military falls prey to this type of error as well.
Yeah, wbb.
At the very least it’s wise to know your enemy.
However, this review of the first of what promises to be a burgeoning genre of US soldier memoirs of Iraq suggests that the grunts have very little knowledge of who they are fighting, why they are fighting, or even where they are fighting. The call all Iraqis “Hajjis”, meaning literally people who have made a pilgrimage to Mecca, but operationally simply a synonym for “Gook”.
Nevertheless, a growing parade of senior US military have denounced Bush’s fiasco. They have lambasted Bush on strictly military grounds. This US Brass would appear to be motivated by a recognition that they have been ordered to fight an enemy the Administration doesn’t know. The Brass also imply that they themselves have come to know this enemy by bitter and unsuccessful experience.
So my response would be that senior US military are in the frustrating position of knowing their enemy but are prevented by politics from putting their knowledge to practical use.
By now, of course, it’s all too late. Iraqis (and jihadis everywhere) can sniff US defeat and fear. That smell boosts morale enormously. They know it’s too late for Bush to escalate. Instead he “surges”. And Al Qaeda laughs at him.
This was always going to be the fate of Bush’s Iraq misadventure.
So a bloody and grisly stalemate, then? Our very own Groszny?
Groszny?
Nah, it won’t last that long. Domestically, Bush is much weaker than Putin.
Bush is, after all:
1. the executive head of a mature constitutional republic. He faces opposition from a workable majority in both Senate and H of R. It will become more politically acceptable over time for Congress to shorten Bush’s leash. I predict that there will still be US troops in Iraq the day Bush leaves the Oval Office for the last time. However, they’ll be guarding little more than the Hungry Jacks in the Green Zone.
2. titular leader of the GOP who are in more or less open revolt against the Bushites. The GOP will split more or less down the middle over supporting a hawk like McCain or some “realist” who supports withdrawal.
3. Commander-in-Chief of a highly professional officer corps infuriated by the humiliation the armed forces have suffered under his command. They’ll support a face-saving defensive posture in the Green Zone and count the days until the end of the Bush presidency, at which point his successor will withdraw the troops.
Game over.
Putin doesn’t have to worry about any of this stuff, especially when he’s polling in the high 60s.
The anti Bush commentators on this thread simply refuse to stand with the Iraqi peoples’ against the suicide murderers who are now acting almost daily in Iraq. In doing so they have intellectually collapsed into a right-wing ‘cult’ that prattles on in left terms with no actual left content.
Elementary international solidarity requires that the freely and fairly elected government of Iraq receive the same support as did the Government of Britain at the time of the London bombing, the government of Spain at the time of the Madrid outrage, the US government on the occasion of 9/11 and so on around the world.
The peoples’ of Iraq have not had that elementary sympathy and solidarity expressed to them by any current ALP leaders. Rudd and Garrett have not come forward and expressed outrage at what is going on and have offered no support to the Iraqi people in their legitimate fight against the same anti-democratic enemy that struck in Bali. Yet they claim to support the ‘War on Terror’. (and the troops)
These crass pseudo-leftists want to abandon the Iraqi peoples’ rather than face a protracted war against the enemy of all modernity. They call the removal of the Baathists a ‘mistake’, a ‘misadventure’ and yet seek to retain the title ‘left’ to describe their politics.
Bush on the other hand is standing with the Iraqi Government but the people commenting on this thread will not. For commenters on this thread all is doom and gloom; the war is lost; the US is now just hanging around for a further two years till the next US president withdraws in defeat.
The players they leave out in all their predictions are the Iraqi peoples.
The suicide bombers will not tolerate democratic norms in Iraq – yet the majority of the Iraqi people came out to vote and defied them no less than three times in 2005. Consequently for the Iraqi people to live as they choose, and to vote as they choose it means that they will have to fight for their democracy. The bombers must be fought by the Iraqi masses till they are defeated or the Iraqi masses subdued. I know what i would prefer.
But for some commentators here, to think that would be ‘historically determinate’.
Re-read this thread and search for any appreciation that there is a difference between the Vietnam War (launched by the US liberals under Kennedy to prevent free and fair elections) and the Iraq War that generated free and fair elections and the most democratic constitution in the Middle East. Rather than contrast the two wars, these wars are painted as Greg Sheridan would have it, as a continuum of policy! Yet the ‘realists’ are screaming about their life work being undone!
This thread has developed in a vacuum-like complete refusal to deal with obvious US policy reversal. The current government of the US under GWB is standing up for the Iraqi masses that are being blown up by the enemies of moderity and bourgeois democracy in their Universities, and market places. Yet university educated people here are turning away and failing to render assistance. Deplorable is too mild. It reminds me of the folowing thread.
sickening defence of murder-suicide fascists
http://www.lastsuperpower.net/disc/members/882946477581
Shaun Cronin
I am just stunned that any rational educated western person could so whimsically toss this into an article.
How can this possibly be “understood” outside of psychological pathology? If this attitude is at all typical of a rising consciousness among western leftists (and I would argue passionately that it IS), then we are truly fucked. I saw this doco as well and came away extremely concerned and only too aware that I do not think that bourgeois westerners raised on the slim diet of post 1960s self-affirming sludge and education-as-therapy will ever be able to prevail over these psychos.
This is MAJOR psychologiccal denial. Unfortunately, I do not think the resources of Medicare or the British NHS could ever extend to compulsory therapy and de-programming of our once meritable, but increasingly lamentable, leftists.
Re-opening old posts brings bad karma!
Just warnin…