Robert Pape on Suicide Terrorism and Islam
February 13, 2008
Robert Anthony Pape is an expert on suicide terrorism and is the founder of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. On 7 February 2008 Pape joined Ron Paul’s presidential campaign as a foreign policy advisor.
Noam Chomsky mentioned his work in a talk titled “War on Terror“
There is broad agreement among specialists that al-Qaeda-style terror “is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries” (Robert Pape, who has done the major research on suicide bombers).
Watch an interview with Robert Pape
Its a very informative post. It will help many of us explain the “Islamic Terrorism” reality to others.
thanks
The link to the interview at the bottom is where the scenes with Pape were taken from and is well worth a watch.
thanks for the info ~
I’m a middle eastern american and my first impression from this posting was duh! the whole world knows these facts, except us here in america. My question is why is the media and our polititians denying a fact. The simple answer would beacuse they do not want the masses to start quationing our policies and why we take military action and interve in other coutries business for simple corporate interest. This is the sad truth. Today’s talk is about Iran’s extremist governement and so called nuclear program, no one mentions that in 1953 Iran had a democratically elected secular progressive government that we toppled in order to insert back the dictatorship of the shah to protect our oil interests. Now we realize that we shot ourselves in the foot. I hope the same won’t happen to Iraq. what we need in america is not only a true separation between church and state, but a separation between corporate interest and state. I hope this helps! Peace to all
So we’re all signed up for off-shore balancing now are we?
That’s where the US Sixth Fleet uses carrier-based airborne coercion of the Gulf region to maintain its lever on the oil spigot.Well,that’s a laudable realist decolonising gesture to which the establishment left can sign up.
It’s certainly going to mean huge Defense Department savings and the US will be able to draw-down that awfully messy occupation in Iraq.No wonder Pape got Defense Dept.sponsorship for the research!
He’s got some brass neck too with his braggadoccio re-the independence he’s been able to sustain in order to come to his (ground-breaking they’re not) conclusions re-suicide bombing.Defense Dept.sponsorship is not likely fertile soil in which to nurture independent research work is it?Unless the Defense Dept.with which students of US foreign policy are familiar has been so chastened by the Iraq disaster that it’s completely changed its spots.
I think not.
Staying the course in Iraq before dealing with Iran and N.Korea those notorious havens of terrorism and totalitarianism to which the US has been unable to attend since reckless strategists (that’s the neo-cons who didn’t read Pape)got the US bogged down in a quagmire in Mespotamia-hereinafter referred to as “the wrong war” in Pape’s analysis.
Beside the revelations about the secular sources of most suicide terrorism and the national liberation strategy that is the defining feature Pape’s conclusions should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t buy into the Islamophobic agenda used by our leaders to justify their “war on terror”.
Beyond the bare bones there is a flawed analysis that bears witness to its US establishment provenance.The idea that democracies are peculiarly vulnerable to suicide terror tactics plays into the very corporate propaganda used by elites to underwrite their foreign crusades in the first place.
Moreover the coercive leverage that Pape sees accruing to terrorists who use suicide tactics actually accrues to their western intelligence and state sponsors with whom Pape deals not at all.The leverage is used by such elites to draw-down the forms of democratic participation that threaten to derail the achievement of their agendas.
It is state-sponsored terrorism that should concern us on the left not suicide terrorism that for the most part (as in the case of the London bombings cited by Pape as a clincher?!)is something quite different and much closer to home.
Re-state-sponsored terrorism which is the real issue one could do a lot worse than re-read Conrad’s The Secret Agent rather than Pape.
For the anarchist network British intelligence sponsored in the late 19th century which the work describes one should read Islamic network and remember how the US,the French and just about everyone else was peed off with the way London had allowed itself to become a terrorist haven in the 1990s.
It was exacly the same when Conrad wrote the novel;when major powers gathered in Milan in 1898 it was to try and pressurise perfidious Albion into taking a stronger line against international terrorism then in its anarchist manifestation.
Conrad’s plot evolves around an attempt by the other powers to use agent provocateurs to wreak a suicide outrage in London that would force Britain to take the international terror threat more seriously.
The outrage is a miserable failure,resulting like the real life events on which Conrad based the story merely in the self-immolation of the victim.
Sound familiar?
They say the truth is stranger than fiction.Read this work again and you’ll probably ask yourself afterwards whether the current malaise in which we find ourselves has not a little to do with our abject incapacity to learn anything from the events of the past.
The world is a hut in which we all live in.
And in Africa it’s often said : If your neighbour’s hut is burning and you do not give him a help to extinguish it, sooner or later, yours’ turn will come.
And also, if a knowledge of a problem is a way in seeking a solution, What should we be waiting for instead of crying endlessly ?