Don't TNT Me, BroThe moral logic of suicide bombing.
Posted Monday, April 28, 2008, at 8:38 AM ET
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StumbleUponFifth, we're trying to upgrade the agility and decision-making of our military devices by entrusting them to living creatures we regard as expendable: animals.
Now let's see how suicide bombings fit into the picture. The logic of these bombings is that they exploit the moral and technical dynamics we just discussed. If you're not particular about which people you kill, or how many, IEDs and suicide bombs give you the biggest bang for the buck. The more people you kill, the more you demoralize the infidel because the infidel is too weak to tolerate the shedding of blood.
But not you. You're strong. You're willing to guarantee, not just risk, the deaths of your followers to deliver the bombs. And they're willing to die. You don't have to tether your mechanism to a dog or mongoose and hope the dumb beast does its job. You've got much smarter animals at your disposal: human beings.
This is scariest thing about the proliferation of suicide bombings: It's perfectly rational. Furthermore, the disadvantage it exploits—and thereby pressures us to reduce—is our valuation of human life.
That's the bad news. Here's the good news: The equation includes an additional variable that can complicate the logic of bombing. The United States vs. al-Qaida isn't a two-player game. It's a multiplayer game, with lots of Muslims watching and weighing. And many of them don't like what they're seeing from al-Qaida because they care about the murder of innocents, even if Osama Bin Laden doesn't.
Four days ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story by Josh Meyer about al-Qaida losing Muslim support over civilian casualties caused by its suicide attacks. A former al-Qaida theologian, a senior Saudi cleric, and many other Muslims have confronted the group with messages of dismay. "How many innocents among children, elderly, the weak and women have been killed and made homeless in the name of al-Qaida?" asked one critic. In the last two months, Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has issued an audio and a Web book attempting to quell the complaints.
This is our most plausible hope of deterring suicide bombings: not some high-tech gizmo, but the real-world costs of sheer moral intolerance.
And there's some basis to believe it may be working. Using the National Counterterrorism Center's Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, Slate editorial assistants Tony Romm and Alex Joseph crunched the country-by-country data for suicide bombings during the four complete years on record: 2004 to 2007. If you take the U.S. war zones out of the picture—Iraq and Afghanistan—the data show a significant increase only from 2006 to 2007. If you discount Pakistan as an annex of the Afghan war, the increase disappears. The only notable increases elsewhere are in Algeria and Sri Lanka, and the combined 2007 total for those two countries was 10 attacks—less than 2 percent of the worldwide total. In other countries, the numbers have actually declined. I'm not saying the surge of bombings in the war zones is no big deal. But at least the cancer hasn't spread.
Bottom line: Over the past four years, suicide bombings have not, in fact, increased around the world. Whether that's due to law enforcement or moral deterrence, I can't say. But let's hope it's the latter because the most reliable safeguard you can ask for in this unreliable world is one grounded in human nature.
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Notes from the Fray Editor
Here's time-saving: a post called "Where does not invading Iraq enter into Saletan's calculus", from the estimable Dilan Esper, and one called "the use of animals in war is immoral" from thedog: so you know where to look for those particular arguments. The first post below led to a long thread on the ethics of war, as did this post.
Comments from the Fray
1. The strategic and tactical value of IED's is not killing American soldiers, per se. It's in exponentially increasing the financial costs associated with maintaining logistics and supply. Roads have to be traveled in convoys, vehicles are disabled and wounded have to be evacuated, helicopters have to be used for valuable payloads and VIPs. That's the real value of the IED's--that's a large part of the reason it's now costing about $3 billion a week to operate there. Killing the soldiers is incidental--wounding them is what costs.
2. Drones and even most laser guided ordnance [are] great at hitting a prescribed spot. They are terrible at actually identifying who happens to be on that spot. In that sense, the suicide bomber, contrary to the car bomb, is actually a theoretically more moral weapon because the targeting software--the brain and eyes of the bomber--are able to accurately discern his target and identify them. Now, if the bomber is interested in killing only civilians, a car bomb would do just as well. Suicide bombers are tactically more useful only when you want to reduce collateral damage by ensuring who's around when it goes off and who isn't. Now, they don't always let it work out that way and civilians do die in suicide bombings, But I'd wager that the collateral damage ratio is actually smaller with a suicide bomber than it is with either drone directed or laser guided munitions.
3. You fail to note the mismatch in life values. You use the term "morality" as though we equally value Iraqi civilian lives as well as our own. That's nonsense. Coalition rules of engagement are all about force protection. We're willing to use remote devices precisely because we're willing to incur much higher levels of Iraqi civilian deaths than US soldier deaths. That's not morality as far as I understand the term. It's more convenience.
--doodahman
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Just put yourself into the shoes of someone who has been wronged (real or perceived) by the US, or any other country that has a modern military. How are you going to avenge the death of your baby brother, your hard-working, studiously unpolitical father, your loving mother? It is simple. If you decide to take up arms against the US, you will die. It may take a day, it may take a year, perhaps 5. The survival rate of insurgents against the US is very, very small. So when you decide to take a stand against overwhelming force, you have decided to commit suicide. It then becomes simply a matter of which way you can inflict the most damage on your opponent. Asymmetric warfare breeds suicide attacks. The better US military technology gets, the more rational suicide attacks become. The more complete the enemy's hold is, the more acceptable a "scorched earth" tactic becomes. The perfectly logical desire to reduce US casualties may be the main reason why US military power is counterproductive to US policy.
--endorendil
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Not really the heart of the article, but I think it deserves some thought anyways. When deciding if someone's actions are "rational," from whose perspective are we deciding this? Everything anyone does is rational according to their current state of mind. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. That doesn't mean I would think what they did was rational. But who gets to judge? It's similar to when economists try to say that people's decisions are not always rational, but it is only because the economists' model is too simple to model human behavior. It's irrational according to the economic model but rational according to the person's own point of view.
--Firstinlastout
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