Political power, wrote John Locke, depends on the
ability to inflict serious punishment for disobedience.
It’s that simple. The U.S. is the world’s strongest
nation because it has the ability to back its policies
with credible military threats. The Israelis dominate
the Middle East for similar reasons. Locke’s insight
is based on a fundamental truism: people place a high
premium on their lives; most of us, most of the time,
would rather live than die. Therefore, we tend to defer
to those who have the ability to put us in mortal
danger.
Every so often we are reminded of the limitations of
this argument. This happens when 19 generally well-to-do
Saudis and Egyptians fly airplanes into American
landmarks, or when Palestinian teenage girls strap
explosives to their bodies and blow themselves up in
Israeli supermarkets. Of course, Islamic militants did
not invent suicide killings. Samson is said to have
screamed ‘let my soul perish with the Philistines’
before he brought down the building upon himself and his
captors. Achilles clearheadedly chose death by the hands
of the Trojans, when he insisted on avenging his beloved
Patroklos. Scores of Japanese fighter pilots flew
open-eyed into American battle ships during the WW II
naval campaigns.
Suicide killers are immune to political power. As
lovers of death they cannot be threatened or deterred.
This is why our military reactions to such attacks are
accompanied by a strange, sinking feeling. We know
something has to be done but we also know it most likely
won’t work. Operations such as those carried out by
the allies in Afghanistan and the Israelis in the West
Bank might be politically necessary, but they have slim
chances of deflecting further attacks.
The bin Ladens and Sheik Yassins of the world call
the political structures we take for granted into
question. We see nation states as the axiom of
international reality, but we are being threatened by
something that is neither a nation nor a state. We
respond in the only way we know, by attacking another
nation (or entity) determined to have supported the
terrorists. But a score of nagging questions continue to
haunt us: could it be that we are engaged in shadow
boxing? That our military might is ill suited to deal
with the new circumstances? That the nation state itself
was only relevant as long as the main sources of danger
to it were other nation states?
Such doubts suggest that suicide attacks represent a
strategic rather than tactical peril to the west. They
endanger not only individual lives but also the
political and international environment as we know it.
Several possibilities for addressing this threat present
themselves. The first involves the employment of
overwhelming and undiscriminating force. The Americans
bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki after kamikaze raids made
it clear that only an unimaginably devastating blow
might break the Japanese resolve. Such a reaction seems
out of the question today. For one thing, terrorists
cannot always be easily affiliated with a specific host
nation. For another, the amount of civilian casualties
in such an attack would not allow the west to maintain
even a shred of moral legitimacy in its struggle.
The second possibility is to throw money at the
problem. Lately, discussions of a Marshall plan for
Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority have abounded.
This approach is extremely limited. Post-World War II
Europe was susceptible to such plans because there was,
despite all the bloodshed and carnage, a great deal of
cultural commonality between the rival sides. The
combatants may have been very busy killing each other
during the war years, but they also emanated from two
thousand years of shared culture to which they could all
relate. It was against the background of this culture
that the creation of new democratic and legal
institutions took place. This commonality is missing in
the current context.
For once, rather than drowning our enemies in blood
or cash, we should pause and try to figure out who they
really are: where they sleep, what they eat, what they
see from their windows. Our defense forces can put a
cruise missile through a door, or destroy an armored
convoy driving at night without lights; but they are
hardly capable of reading an Arab newspaper or making
sense of a street corner conversation. An army of Arab
speakers and readers might be just as useful to us as a
fleet of jets or drones. The key for coming to grips
with the cult of death that has engulfed our rivals lies
in understanding what it is about us that enrages the
average person on the street. Such knowledge cannot be
obtained from an altitude of 30,000 feet or from
Pentagon command rooms. It might be terribly time
consuming. It will probably show few immediately
cashable political results. Nevertheless there is no
other way of comprehending how it could be that while we
are so afraid of dying, our foes became scared of
living.
Ajume Wingo is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy
and Senior Fellow at
the McCormack Institute's Center for Democracy and
Development, University
of Massachusetts Boston. His book, Veil Politics
in Liberal Democratic States, is forthcoming from
Cambridge University Press (September 2003). Nir
Eisikovits, an Israeli attorney getting a Ph.D. in
philosophy at Boston University, is a captain in the
Israeli reserves. He is writing his dissertation on
inter-group reconciliation.
