By Jason Schwalm
For those who believe that there exists a clash of civilizations between Islamic nations and the West, no one phenomenon better exemplifies this conflict in values than suicide bombing.
The logic of suicide bombing confounds political thinkers, and many conflicting accounts of a bomber’s rationale have been speculated. A Department of Defense report notes that “the bomber secures salvation and the pleasures of Paradise.”
One popular explanation supposes that Muslim nations’ total disdain for the West informs their actions. “How much must they hate America,” goes the line, “if they are willing to destroy themselves to destroy us?” The philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, in “The Spirit of Terrorism,” theorizes that Middle Eastern insurgent fighters and rebel groups have changed the very nature of warfare. No longer can America, with its military might, merely threaten the possibility of killing its enemy. The enemy assumes his own death, through suicide bombing, and cannot be overcome by force.
Stories about the promise of virgins and a heavenly reward, paint an infantilizing picture of fools who would trade their lives for ephemeral imaginings, as does the conception that insurgent fighters are motivated by nothing more than American-hating piss and vinegar. Neither is Baudrillard’s notion entirely adequate, depicting desperate nihilists reacting to a power imbalance so severe that a willingness to die is the only possible response.
Suicide bombing does not, despite belief to the contrary, represent a total lapse in self-preservatory instinct. Instead, the phenomenon can be understood through the kind of straightforward logic that would be familiar to any American.
Assume two insurgent groups, each with 2,000 members. The first group will enter into a head-to-head military engagement with a force superior in technology and numbers. This group will immediately suffer heavy casualties, and a thousand or more will be killed or captured. The second group has elected a strategy of guerilla warfare, and will employ daily suicide bombings.
If faced with a choice, the average person would select the group in which an individual member had the highest likelihood of survival: namely, the second group.
When considered in light of the probability of personal injury, membership in an insurgent group that uses suicide bombing might very well be a lucid, coherent course of action, arrived at through simple cost-benefit analysis.
Such a conclusion only seems counter-intuitive because of a natural aversion to the idea of voluntary death. In a nation where it remains illegal for the painfully infirmed and often debilitated elderly to elect to die, it is no surprise that we conceptualize Islamist fighters as idiot fanatics pointlessly detonating themselves in the name of a higher power.
However, our hasty dismissal of those who use suicide bombing is self-defeating. Success in the war on terror depends on our leaders’ willingness and ability to consider all aspects of the conflict, unimpeded by hubris or a distaste for the unfamiliar.
If suicide bombing is the irrational act of lunatics bent on destruction at any price, then it is truly unstoppable.
Jason Schwalm is a first-year law student at the Brandeis School of Law. E-mail him at opinion@louisvillecardinal.com.
