Killer instincts

According to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaida's "Martyr's Battalion" had more eager suicide volunteers than it knew what to do with. But, McDermott writes, "on a purely pragmatic level, it was easier for Saudis than almost anyone else to get American visas." An INS officer told the 9/11 commission that when he had the temerity to turn back a particularly suspicious Saudi at immigration in Orlando, Fla., in August 2001, his co-workers warned him he could get in trouble for not showing the customary "extraordinary deference" accorded to visitors from that country. (Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers, waited in vain for the man in the terminal.)

Because the total number of men who have killed themselves executing al-Qaida attacks is only 43, a difference in the nationality of even six of those (who might have been Yemeni or Moroccan instead, if the original candidates could have gotten visas) is a difference of a whopping 14 percent. With a sample so small, wouldn't we learn a lot more by looking at individual cases in depth? If so, we'd realize that Pape's observation that "al Qaida suicide terrorists are ten times more likely to come from a Sunni country with American military presence than from another Sunni country" is misleading. Many of the Sept. 11 conspirators only became radicalized after moving to Hamburg, Germany, to go to school, and many did not care much about the politics of their homelands.

In fact, to judge from the life stories in "Perfect Soldiers," one typical path to al-Qaida membership involves a not very religious young man leaving a Muslim home country for the first time to attend college in the West, suffering the alienation of culture shock and seeking the familiarity of a local mosque that happens to specialize in cultivating jihadists. (A Muslim from a nation with which the West has friendly relations is more likely to be able to embark on such a path.) Many of the families of the Sept. 11 hijackers were completely blindsided by their sons' involvement in the plot; at home the boys had shown no anti-Americanism or interest in politics.

To be fair, Pape is trying to counteract a dumb view of what provokes the suicide terrorism of groups like al-Qaida. This is the "They hate our freedoms" line of propaganda, advanced by such apparatchiks as David Frum and Richard Perle, whose book "An End to Evil" Pape quotes in his conclusion. According to these two Iraq war boosters, "The roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself," which they characterize as a toxic faith embraced by backward societies.

Pape seems to think his book can persuade the kind of people who actually believe that al-Qaida members are demented fanatics whose only goal in killing Americans is to revel in their own Christian-hating craziness. I don't doubt that such people do exist, but they're not reading books full of numbered tables and references to Emile Durkheim; they're not reading anything much at all (and if we were lucky, they wouldn't be voting, either).

For anyone with a more sophisticated view of world politics, the bright line Pape tries to draw between religious and political motivations seems a pointless exercise. It's hard to conceive of any terrorist group that doesn't offer a political reason for its actions; even white supremacist cranks claim that a federal government run by blacks and Jews is mistreating European-Americans.

Pape insists that the rationality of a terrorist's grievance is irrelevant; if bin Laden believes that the U.S. is running Saudi Arabia, that makes his agenda one of national liberation, not religious animosity. But if you apply this standard -- the target must be a population that even the attacker agrees was simply minding its own business and not bothering anyone -- there's probably never been a campaign of pure religious hatred. Even the most monstrous leaders purport to be correcting a wrong or fending off a threat when they urge their followers to go out and kill total strangers.

What's more significant about the various activities of al-Qaida -- which has included sending fighters from all over the world to defend Muslims being brutalized in Kosovo and Chechnya -- is that for these militants, the political and the religious cannot be separated. It's true that Islamists would not likely be moved to strike against Western powers if they didn't believe those powers to be harming Muslims. On the other hand, they wouldn't feel moved to defend many of those victims if they weren't Muslims. According to McDermott, when Mohammed Atta railed against the crimes of Americans and Jews to his Hamburg crowd, he didn't denounce the government of his home country, Egypt, for agreeing to tolerate Israel in exchange for U.S. aid. He talked of the Muslims dying in Palestine and the Balkans.

Perhaps Pape can devise some pretzel twist of a rationale to explain how the four British-born men of Pakistani and Jamaican descent who decided to kill themselves over the war in Iraq were actually engaged in a struggle of national liberation. But those men weren't Iraqis. They weren't even Arabs. What made them care about what happens to Iraqis is the fact that Iraqis are (mostly) fellow Muslims. What made Atta willing to die to punish the U.S. for its policies is that the victims of those policies were Muslims. The government that Osama bin Laden dreams of setting up in Saudi Arabia (and eventually elsewhere, if like Pape you give him credit for meaning everything he says) is one that is indistinguishable from his own religious sect. So to say that what drives him is primarily political and not religious just doesn't wash.

Next Page: The appeal of fundamentalism

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