Jim Hoagland, the hawkish columnist who cheered merrily for the Iraq War, claims to be puzzled: The Weapon of Martyrdom Washington Post 12/26/04. And he seems to assume that everyone else is as puzzled as he is:
The suicide bomber is the cutting-edge weapon of campaigns to drive U.S. troops out of the Middle East, to prevent Iraqis from holding elections, and to wreak revenge and retribution on Israelis, Australians and Indians, among others. The human weapon is the deadly tool we understand least and defend ourselves against most inadequately. ...
Even after the exhaustive work of the Sept. 11 commission, we are essentially still guessing about the forces that made Mohamed Atta and his co-conspirators exult in the chance to end their own lives so that Americans would die with them on that dark day.
Maybe if Hoagland and others who were so eager to see the US get bogged down in an unwinnable war in Iraq had been paying attention to that question instead, he might have noticed some of the relevant work that has been done. He might have picked up that Atta and his cohorts were devout Muslims, who believed they were on a sacred mission, and that they believed killing for God was more important than their own lives.
He might have noticed some of the studies on cult groups that shed some light on suicidal actions in service of a revered leader. He might have come across some of the descriptions of ways in which a supportive environment can be built up to create the conditions for such actions.
If he had spent a few minutes clicking around on Web resources, he might have come across the paper Juan Cole presented at a forum on "Genocide and Terrorism: Probing the Mind of the Perpetrator," at the Yale Center for Genocide Studies on 04/09/03, called Al-Qaeda’s Doomsday Document and Psychological Manipulation. And he might have discovered some clues to this secret that he has so far been totally unable to penetrate (at least until the revelation at the end of his column discussed below). For instance, Cole writes:
Recitation [of holy verses] is thus essential to establishing the set of mind and the spiritual conditions conducive to success. ...
In this document, the carnal self is the enemy of the vow to die, selfishly seeking to hang on to life, and so must be vanquished. Admonishing the self is the way to contain it and remain true to the death vow. ...
This immersion in key sacred texts is important to attaining the mindset of the martyr, to thinking of oneself as already dead and preparing to receive the delights of divine recompense. ...
The Surah of Spoils thus situates the Twin Towers and Pentagon raids in Islamic history for the al-Qaeda cult. It mapped the United States onto Pagan Mecca. ...
The hijackers convinced themselves that they were seventh-century Muslim raiders defending the “Medina” of the Muslim world against aggressive American Meccans soldiers, who were determined to wipe out true Islam. ...
In order to maintain a liminal consciousness committed to suicide and mass murder, the hijackers may well have kept themselves sleep-deprived, praying into the small hours of the morning, and then getting up for flight school or other activities. Certainly, they were advised to do so on their last night. The activity of praying, chanting and reciting through the night would aid in the auto-hypnosis necessary to maintaining their self-image as martyrs vowed to die. [Cole's observations on this issue are supported by the work of Margaret Taylor Singer and Janja Lalich on cults.]
The hijackers are encouraged to live in a magical world of omens and angels, where small ritual acts serve as guarantees of divine succor . . .
Cole discusses the ways in which Sufi ideas that were part of the intellectual heritage of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt may have influenced the thinking of Muhammed Atta. He discusses the ways that the pleasurable flings in bars and strip clubs that the hijackers enjoyed may have functioned not only as cover for the operatives, but also as a tool for Al Qaeda to play on their guilt at having indulged in un-Muslim activities, from their fundamentalist point of view. "If it was Bin Laden who put them up to this double life," Cole writes, "he may well have done so with personal knowledge of the kind of guilt it would induce, and the kind of self-hatred and openness to manipulation to which the guilt could lead."
Gee, it kinda sorta looks like some people have been thinking about this stuff. Even doing actual research on the motivations of the actual hijackers. Wow, imagine that!
Had Hoagland found some of these things and thought about them, he might also have given some thought to the ways the US might go about disrupting the factors which enables such psychological manipulation and misguided religious faith to go so far astray.
But that might have led him to wonder whether creating a grand new cause for the jihadists by invading Iraq was a good policy. And every good and true pundit knew that we were desperately menaced by Saddam Hussein's massive stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction."
No, better to cheer for a totally unnecessary war, and a "preventive war" against international law at that. The pain of actual thought might have been too much to bear. And now he gets to share his Deep Thoughts with us on the unfathomable mystery of these Evil Muslims and why they do what they do. For example, after thinking about this issue for all of, oh, five minutes or so from appearances, Hoagland shares this enlightenment with us:
The suicide artists find a meaning in death that they do not find in life, whether in their own broken societies or the more dynamic conditions of the West. They would erase the dividing line between religion and politics -- a line that constantly shifts in open societies to reflect changing moral and material conditions -- in order not to have to face choice and its consequences.
They're just immature and irresponsible, you see. Kind of like suburban teenagers, or those welfare mothers that good Republicans hear about from Rush Limbaugh or Fox News occasionally. If they would just grow up, they wouldn't be engaging in all this silly suicide bombing stuff.
I suppose there was a thought, or some fragment of one, behind that line about how wanting to "erase the dividing line between religion and politics" in order to avoid growing up was supposed to explain suicide bombers. I'm afraid I failed to grasp what that thought or semblance thereof may have been. Does this mean that we can expect the admirers of Roy Moore, the Alabama Ten Commandments guy, to start strapping themselves with explosives and blowing themselves up in their local malls?
And this is from one of the Big Pundits, whose opinions on foreign policy "respectable" people take seriously. Another illustration of why we have such a warped foreign policy.
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