Oct. 27, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Why Suicide?
 
By Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service
 
While obvious, it's still worth underlining: A terrible fact about radical Islamic terrorism is the extreme difficulty of coping with an enemy who is not only willing to risk his life in order to commit mass murder, but is absolutely intent on giving it up.
 
This attitude of mind, this unflinching commitment, is vastly different from what has ordinarily been encountered in warfare through the ages and is many times as difficult to cope with as an attitude that is brave without being determinedly suicidal.
 
It is especially perilous when combined with modern explosives and is surely a primary reason for the ongoing disarray in Iraq and the renewed threat of the Taliban in Afghanistan and why it poses grave dangers for our own land.
 
Soldiers in combat know they are at risk, and sometimes know the odds are hugely against them. They mostly fight on anyway, while usually heeding the sentiment General George Patton is supposed to have expressed, that you do not win wars by dying for your country, but by making the enemy die for his.
 
Sometimes, though far from frequently, soldiers will utterly forget any self-concern and engage in a reckless, mindless killing frenzy, as happened in at least one battle in the American Civil War. And sometimes soldiers have preferred death of every last one of them in a battle to retreat or surrender, or have intentionally killed themselves to inflict damage on the adversary. The Japanese largely fought this way toward the end of World War II. But that's also rare.
 
It is not rare for Islamic extremists to fight suicidally, although, of course, they mainly avoid outright battle. They are more like criminals than soldiers in that respect -- they usually do their deadly work against civilians, dressed as civilians themselves, striking out of the blue in cities. You contain criminality by making it dangerous and likely to result in capture and punishment. Suicide bombers are not deterred by danger or the possibility of punishment, and their technique of randomness makes selective defense largely ineffectual.
 
Knowing how to fight back surely requires us to figure out where the suicidal intent comes from, and part of the answer, I think, is that this is not a psychological aberration afflicting an infinitesimally small percentage of the population, as was the case with the man who recently killed five Amish schoolgirls, wounded five others and then killed himself in Harrisburg, Pa. The suicide bombers may share some of the desperate sense of forlornness of such killers in our society, but among certain Middle East groups they are found in scarily large numbers, and are not, strictly speaking, insane. Something deeply cultural would seem to be at play, and not something courageous.
 
Remember, after 9/11, what the TV comedian Bill Maher said? "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building -- say what you want about it, it's not cowardly." Yes, it is. Visiting harm on innocent people who cannot fight back has long been part of the definition of cowardice, while it is implicit in any definition of courage that this quality of character empowers people to act despite a deep desire to avoid what the action might bring down on them. If you act knowing beforehand that you are bound to die, there is something other than courage at work -- something described brilliantly, in my estimation, by Eric Hoffer, the blind, longshoreman philosopher who died in 1983.
 
In "The True Believer," a book written in 1951 about mass movements, Hoffer said those who engage in impractical, world-threatening movements to bring sweeping change are people "who see their lives as irremediably spoiled, " who look on "self-interest" as "tainted and evil" and seek "purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause." This faith in the cause is a "substitute" for "lost faith" in themselves. Unjustified in claiming "excellence" for themselves, they claim it for the cause. They take their mind off their "own meaningless affairs" by "minding other people's business." They see in their cause "an irresistible power" -- they have an "extravagant and uncompromising" confidence in it, and they are "ready to die for it."
 
There is a strain in Islam that is suicidally violent and fascistic and intent on changing the world, but the question remains why so many -- though obviously a minority of Muslims -- embrace it. Could it be chiefly because their repressive, closed, autocratic societies offer them so few avenues for any kind of halfway interesting or meaningful personal lives, and if that is the case, isn't the idea of converting Afghanistan and Iraq into decent, self-governing societies one means of eventually reducing the number who reach out as true believers for this holy cause?
 
I think so.
 
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.