Hacking - The Suicide Weapon

The Suicide Weapon
Ian Hacking
The Weapon The suicide weapon must be as old as the human race or older. It may be part of a system of animal survival. One dies, knowing that one is bound to be killed, in defense or attack, in order that kin or clan shall survive. Perhaps only people can be said to know that they are bound to be killed. If so, then the suicide weapon, like suicide itself, is uniquely human. Those who like the fancies of evolutionary psychology can imagine that Homo sapiens made it through the titanic struggle with the Neanderthal species precisely because our lot had the wit and the courage to deploy the suicide weapon. Human groups who ran away in their entirety were wiped out by longer legs and stronger arms, so the genes of groups able to use the suicide weapon prospered, if a few individuals did not. I do not believe that fantasy for a moment. We are, however, so confused both about suicide and about its use in battle that we should try out innumerable unexpected angles of approach. We need shaking up because suicide is encumbered with so many conceptual taboos that we do not know how to think it. The meanings of suicide itself are so protean across time and space that it is not so clear that there is one thing, suicide. A universalist view more modest than my fake evolutionary story can be tied to words of Goethes: Suicide is an event that is part of human nature, which, whatever may be said and done with respect to it, demands the sympathy of every man, and in every epoch must be discussed anew.1 Let us take this route and say that there is one such thing as suicide, peculiar to human beings. We will not battle about denitions. We will be mile Durkheim. He counted as a suicide plain and positivist in the style of E
This essay is essentially the text of a Critical Inquiry lecture at the University of Chicago, 27 April 2007. The rst half, about suicide, is not date sensitive, but the second half, about weapons, is. Almost all the bombings used as examples occurred during April 2007. I have not attempted to replace the horrors of that month by more recent ones. The specics have changed, but, alas, the general points remain valid. I have, however, updated the Sri Lankan story because it is pretty much ignored in the Western press. 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1974), 2:212.
Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008) 2008 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/08/3501-0003$10.00. All rights reserved.
Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon
any case of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.2 Very well. Goethe: Suicide is part of human nature, an inescapable possibility in the human condition. Durkheim: There are absolutely clear yesand-no criteria for suicide, even if, in particular cases, the question of how to apply them can defeat the best forensic science. We shall not pose a philosophical problem about either universality or denition. The trouble is that what the act can mean is enormously variable. Hence I shall divide this essay into two parts, the rst dealing with suicide and the second with weapons.
1. Suicide Contemporary Western Suicide In the past couple of hundred years our industrial civilization has almost totally pathologized and medicalized suicide. It is now tied to depression. Nothing is more shattering than the suicide of a friend. Nothing smashes the spirit of a psychiatrist more than the suicide of a patient. Nothing seems more awful than for young people to kill themselves. When a wave of suicides passes through an adolescent cohort in a native village in northern Canada, the entire nation is steeped in shame and guilt, recalling, for once, the appalling conditions in which many northern aboriginal peoples live. At the other end of the prosperity spectrum, a fteen-year-old boy kills himself on Nantucket in February 2007, a seventeen-year-old girl in November, and probably but not certainly a teenage drowning in February 2008 was suicide. Nantucket is a resort island off the Massachusetts coast, but these events took place in winter when the holiday crowd is not there. The island is in shock, and an army of traumatologists descends.3 Such shock is a Western commonplace. Here is a headline from an Irish
mile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George 2. E Simpson (Glencoe, Ill., 1951), p. 44. 3. On YouTube you will nd lots of photos of happy campers during Nantucket summers and also short videos of the four-piece Los Angeles rock band Nantucket Suicide posted in July 2006. Neither phenomenon seems much discussed in this context, although there is some stuff about the winters closing in and Nantucket closing in on itself during the winter. A long-
I A N H A C K I N G is professor emeritus at both the Colle ` ge de France and the University of Toronto. His book Identities will appear in 2009. Previous books include The Emergence of Probability (2d ed. 2006), Historical Ontology (2002), The Social Construction of What? (1999), Mad Travelers (1998), Rewriting the Soul (1995), and Representing and Intervening (1983).
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008
newspaper: Suicide Is Caused by a Culture of Despair. That is a quotation from a letter by the archbishop of Armagh prompted by the suicides of two young men, aged twenty-one and twenty-three. In the course of the story we hear a psychiatric nurse: A lot of times, people do make that cry for help and we should never ignore that cry for help.4 There are three ideas here: suicide is caused by depression, it thrives in a culture of despair, and attempted suicide is a cry for help. These three pretty well sum up our present conception of suicide. They are the folk wisdom distilled from expert medical opinion and, though brief, well represent present scientic knowledge. As a corollary, news of a suicide among us has an immediate response: horror. This wholly modern feel to suicide, and the gamut of its associated meanings, make us totally confused when we think about either euthanasia or the suicide weapon. There is something unspeakably horrible about a young man killing himself in order to kill others. And there is something profoundly unnerving about aiding ailing adults to kill themselves in order to terminate pain or loss of memory. Putting these two topics, euthanasia and suicide bombers, together in the same sentence will disgust advocates of assisted suicide. But that is my rst theme, that suicide is an extraordinary manifold of meanings. We are hamstrung when confronting new problems if we cannot both control our fears and also escape the embrace of present scientic folklore about suicide. The trio of depression, despair, and help does not capture suicide. My second theme is that we ought to conceptualize the suicide weapon not only under the category of suicide but also under the category of weaponry.
Noble Suicide I shall turn to the hateful second theme all too soon. The rst task is to some extent easier because of distance; we can recall suicides of long ago. I shall be brief about the Christian tradition that made an abomination out of suicide. It has no clear biblical foundation. It appears early, but the arguments to show that suicide is impermissible would not, in my opinion, fare well in a freshman class on critical thinking. Augustine argued from the commandment thou shalt not kill. (a) The
standing European and North American generalization is that suicides, contrary to what one might expect, are far more common in the summer than the winter. 4. Maeve Sheehan, Suicide Is Caused by a Culture of Despair, Sunday Independent (Ireland), 26 Dec. 2004, www.independent.ie/national-news/suicide-is-caused-by-a-culture-ofdespair-487544.html
meaning is that one should not kill a man. (b) He who kills himself, kills a man. Therefore, suicide is forbidden.5 Aquinas struggled at greater length.6 Some cynics will nd his opening ve objections more compelling than his citation of Augustine followed by his own three reasons. In fact, we are less concerned with a theological doctrine of Christianity than with an entrenched condemnation of suicide that probably arose from general opposition to all things Romanincluding the lax imperial attitudes to suicide. I shall return to Nietzsches unkind observations on this point in connection with martyrs. To remind ourselves of the disparate conceptions of suicide, we may turn to the Enlightenment. Hume, as always, is an elegant resort. At the end of his essay On Suicide he said of the classic noble suicides of antiquity that Cato and Brutus, Arrea and Portia acted heroically; those who now imitate their example ought to receive the same praises from posterity. The power of committing suicide is regarded by Pliny as an advantage which men possess even above the Deity himself.7 This last is a lovely thought! The one power that we have and that the gods lack is that we can kill ourselves. Hume speaks of heroes. The classic hero for my Canadian boy scout boyhood was Captain Oates. He is the man who walked out of Scotts idiotic expedition to the South Pole in order to freeze himself to death and thus to make no more demands on the hard-pressed company. We should not forget the word hero when we turn to the suicide weapon.
The Aristocratic Vice But now for a completely different story. The historian Donna Andrew passed on to me one sharp rebuke to conceptual complacency about suicide.8 She told me that the three intimately linked aristocratic vices of eighteenth-century England were dueling, suicide, and gambling. I mentioned this to Steven Stigler, mathematical statistician and the best historian of his eld. He is also a notable collector of old books on related subjects. I happen to own an eighteenth-century book on suicide, he said, getting up from the table with evident skepticism. He returned with
5. See Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York, 1950), bk. 1, chap. 20, p. 26. 6. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (Westminster, Md., 1981), vol. 3, q. 64, art. 5, pp. 1462 64. 7. David Hume, On Suicide, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols. (Boston, 1854), 4:546n. 8. Donna Andrew is the author of the forthcoming study The Attack on Aristocratic Vice: Cultural Skirmishes in Eighteenth-Century England.
two volumes that had On Suicide engraved on their spines. We opened to the title page and found, A full inquiry into the subject of suicide: to which are added (as being closely connected with the subject) two treatises on duelling and gaming by Charles Moore, Rector of Cuxton MDCCXC9 The book is not some quaint local oddity, spun out over a game of whist in the rectory. The authors inquiry covers the waterfront, in a way worthy of a good seminar in analytic philosophy today. It looks deeply into Hume on suicide, who is rebutted. It respects Kant but remains critical of his deontology. It fears the romantic excesses of Goethe. It delves into the ancients. It treats, in short, of all the authors that remain standard texts today. The conceptual space that suicide inhabits is nevertheless of a piece with dueling and gambling. That is almost unthinkable for us unless we are jolted into some sort of psychobabble that rereads the three vices as failures to cope and cries for help, hardly the system of thought of the Reverend Moore. In his world, suicide was less a matter of despair than of debauchery.
Self-Murder To those two vignettes of Enlightenment suicide we must add the familiar trio of Goethe, Kant, and Kleist. There are the inevitable sorrows of young Werther, 1774. Then there is Kants response to Hume and Goethe in the 1797 Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. It states in abstract form the doctrine that suicide is always a moral failing. No mincing of words, it is self-murder.10 So it is murder. That is Augustines syllogism all over again. We are not Kantian. We make distinctions. The suicide of those dying in agony or of dissolution of the mind is widely condoned in all but the law. Yet most Western jurisdictions still try and often convict people who perpetrate assisted suicide for murder or murder-related offences. Kant was the Enlightenment but also its terminus. Suicide, in literate society, moved from Edinburgh to Weimar to Ko nigsberg and then to the banks of the Wannsee. The poet-novelist Heinrich von Kleist fell in love with Henriette Vogel, who was suffering from an incurable cancer. They
9. Charles Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide: To Which Are Added (as Being Closely Connected with the Subject) Two Treatises on Duelling and Gaming (London, 1790). 10. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans. James Ellington (1797; Indianapolis, 1964), 6, p. 82.
made a pact. On 21 November 1821 he shot her and then himself. He was forty-four years old. After that much-publicized event, real-life suicide became, for a while, as incurably romantic as it had been in Goethes imagination. The idea of suicide summoned up not the emotion of horror but the fantasy of the tortured soul, the genius who feels too deeply.
Pathology We are not now either Kantian or romantic. After the era of Napoleon everything deviant began to be counted, and suicide was one of the rst targets. It became necessary to record the causes of death, so suicide was noticed as never before. In the great battle for control between the two professions, the law and medicine, the quarry was divvied up with the law conrming suicide as illegal and medicine taking suicide as a pathology to be treated by moral suasion by an alienist. The idea of a special kind of person, the suicidal person, was launched. Suicide was increasingly medicalized as the nineteenth century progressed. The tendency to biologize most sorts of deviant behavior, so dominant today, began in the 1820s with suicide. The present program of nding a neurological basis for everything came in at the start, as the brains of suicides were examined in the hope of locating a neurological marker for the disposition to suicide.11 The program failed, and despite our present enthusiasm for nding genetic markers of everything bad no one is looking for the suicide gene. Depression may be heritable, yes, but suicide, no. All the same, it runs in families . . . . The Suicidal Person? There are now elaborate checklists intended to help parents, schoolteachers, colleagues, nurses, and other caregivers notice risk factors for suicide. These are made more precise on numerous technical testing schedules used by therapists, psychiatrists, and other professionals. Clinicians who try to intervene and help people who test positive for suicide risk factors to a more stable and satisfying life are doing yeoman service. Such interventions have surely helped individuals who were picked out as having risk factors. They can be led to a better sense of themselves and to greater participation in their communities. Hence they no longer exhibit the risk factors with the same severity. It is of course true that many people who would probably have committed suicide have been helped not to do so. That said, it is not at all obvious that there is such a thing as the suicidal
11. See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990), p. 70.
person in the sense of the kind of person who will kill himself unless prevented or the kind of person who will kill himself if his life goes on as it is. There is a class of people who score high on certain tests. These tests are validated, that is, they regularly pick out the same people, and experts agree that the people picked out form a replicable class. Many respond to current forms of help. Nevertheless I very much doubt that there is such a thing as the suicidal person. That is, there is no such subspecies of humanity in the way in which we talk of the the child with cerebral palsy. Such a remark in no way diminishes the value of trying to notice and prevent possible suicides.
Statistics Actual suicide is rare, less than one percent of deaths. Some societies are more suicidal than others. That was the starting observation for the found mile Durkheims Suicide. In America ing classic of numerical sociology, E the two groups most at risk for suicide are youths aged 16 25, and old white males. The national suicide rate does not change much, but the distribution does. More and more middle-aged men are killing themselves, while the rates for youths and ancients are in decline. The horror aspect of suicide is magnied when it involves young people. If it is a youth you know or lovewell, that is unbearable. But it also seems horrible in the abstract. The feeling is, in part, what a terrible waste of a life, all those hopes and dreams that the young deserve, shattered by cruel and inexplicable self-destruction. We are shocked, horried, when we are told, as we often are, that more and more young people are killing themselves. There is talk of a silent epidemic of suicide and assertions that the rate of teen suicide has trebled in the past thirty years. In fact, in the last completed decade, 19912000, there was an overall decline in the real risk group, 16 25. Continuous decline, in fact, since 1994. The decline continues. I speak of the the real risk group because 16 25 is the risky decade for every violent social problem we emphasize: brutal crime, automobile accidents, gunshot death, you name it. Also the real decade of triumph for athletics, distance vision, computer wizardry, you name it. From birth to sixteen humans mature, and develop all the talents with which they are born. After that, until age twenty-ve, they master all the complex knowledge and skills that are culturally acquired and passed on and create new ones. They do so at an amazing rate. It is also an age when there are disasters. It is the age group from which we choose our young soldiers, and it is a high-risk group for suicide. If there is one human universal that is plausibly explained by evolutionary psychology it is the fact that most acts
of violence, in all cultures at all times, are committed by young males between the ages of sixteen and twenty-ve.12 I said there has recently been a mild decline in suicides in the real risk group. Perhaps it is one of those statistical ups and downs, for suicide rates are pretty stable. Within stability, there may be real causal effects. Here is a thoroughly unscientic suggestion, not to be found, so far as I know, in the tons of pages published about suicide in the United States every year. First, there was a troublesome increase in the small number of suicides by adolescents younger than sixteen. Second, the decline in the 16 25 group is mostly at the older end, with less decline among the 16 19 range. Proposal: Americans are growing up quicker. There is plenty of evidence for that in sports and sex alike. Thus the proposal: the high-risk group for all kinds of violence, and all kinds of success, and for suicide, is moving down from 16 25 to 1221. More striking than the mild decline in suicide in the high-risk youngperson group is the larger (and smoother) decline in suicide in the moresuicidal over-sixty-ve group, where white males are at highest risk. This may be a causal phenomenon, namely, the result of the greater use of tranquilizers and antidepressants, especially in assisted-care facilities. Old white males are, at any rate, in the recent past, not killing themselves as frequently as they used to. But they remain the most suicidal people on the planet. As if to make up for declines among the young and old, suicide is becoming increasingly common among middle-aged baby-boomers.
Autodestruction Despite visible trends and perturbations in the short term, national suicide rates are remarkably stable. This was noticed at the very beginning of suicide statistics and led, in the 1850s, to bizarre but very inuential arguments that human beings do not have free will since the proportion who kill themselves, in a given population, is itself a law of social nature.13 All sorts of national suicide characteristics were among the rst to be noticed: that the French drown themselves or asphyxiate with carbon monoxide (charcoal res); that the English hang or shoot themselves; that North Germans and French are equally suicidal, while the English and the Irish are much less so. (People now say that Durkheim was misled by a reporting effect; since suicides could not be buried in sacred ground, Irish families concealed suicides.) Despite what is said about Swedes, the na12. The classic studies are by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Sex, Evolution, and Behavior (North Scituate, Mass., 1978) and Homicide (New York, 1988). 13. See Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820 1900 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), and Hacking, The Taming of Chance.
tional champions were Saxons and Hungarians. Two hundred years later they still are. Those who have seen The Lives of Others (dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006), a lm about the Stasi, may recall that the German Democratic Republic stopped publishing suicide statistics because they revealed people were not so happy in socialist paradise. Wrong lesson. All that was happening was that people in Saxony kept on killing themselves just as frequently in the GDR as when Saxony was an independent kingdom. Emmanuel Todd is now something of an important French intellectual, unusual in that he likes many things Anglo. He was trained as a demographer in Cambridge, England, and combined what he learned there with Durkheimian insights. He was the rst to predict, on the basis of sound statistical analysis, the collapse of the Soviet system. That was when he was twenty-ve, in 1976.14 Durkheim used suicide as a measure of social health. Todd extended that to all kinds of what he called autodestruction.15 Self-murder by alcohol, as measured by death rates from cirrhosis of the liver. Industrial accidents, automobile fatalities. We would now have to include death by smoking nicotine. Todd used comparative autodestruction statistics to urge that the French self-conception as a Latin people is totally false. By the Durkheimian measure of autodestruction, the French are indistinguishable from North Germans and completely different from the Italians or the Spanish. The types of death that Todd les under autodestruction are all, in some sense, avoidable. Most automobile accidents are associated with speed, with age of drivers, with intoxication, and the like. But societies nd the deaths acceptable relative to the penalties of driving more slowly, stopping the old from driving at age sixty-ve, and preventing the young from driving until they are twenty-ve. The death rate by autodestruction could be called the rate of socially acceptable self-death. This leads one to think of autodestruction as social suicide, which includes personal suicide. This notion of statistical socially acceptable suicide is startling. I have introduced it as a nal example to shake us from the complacent trio of depression, despair, and a cry for help. One should include in socially accepted U.S. autodestruction mass killings in schools, post ofces, and malls. Every time there is a gruesome batch of mass murders like the one in Blacksburg, Virginia, the highbrow
14. See Emmanuel Todd, La Chute nale: Essai sur la de composition de la sphe `re sovie tique (Paris, 1976). 15. See Todd, Le Fou et le prole taire (Paris, 1979).
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press nds itself obliged to have learned disquisitions explaining the difference between suicide bombers and mad mass shooters who end up dead. More instructive would be to think of these events in America under the category of socially accepted American autodestruction rates.16 Think of the NRA demands to keep guns and ammunition readily accessible as enabling a statistical massacre akin to Jonesville except it is not collective personal suicide of nine hundred deluded people in a jungle, but statistical, socially accepted, autodestruction-by-gunshot of thirty thousand Americans a year. That equals the number who die by traditional suicide.
2. Weapons Disclaimer Let us turn to suicide as a weapon of murder. There are now many Western experts on the subject, in addition to those who serve in governmental, military, or clandestine agencies.17 Some are employed in university centers that specialize in terrorism. For example, the authors in a recent issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, include Cindy Ness, the director of programs at the Center on Terrorism, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Mia Bloom, now at the University of Georgia, formerly in the Security, Governance, and Terrorism Program at the University of Cincinnati.18 Unlike these and many other experts, I have no special knowledge. A philosopher may be expected to share the attitude of Albert Camus, who held that the question of suicide was the only serious question of philosophy. Not only do I disagree, but also I shun profundity. I want only to encourage a reection on the suicide weapon of a sort that is different from scholars who focus primarily on terrorism. All the experts to whom I have referred or will refer are Western, writing for Western consumption. I shall be writing about the suicide
16. There are of course mass shootings outside the United States. On 15 September 2006 there was an avowedly Columbine look-alike attack in a junior college in Montre al. In that same city, 6 December 1989, in a polytechnic, there was a sui generis mass murder of female students studying engineering. It is still commemorated with a minute of silence all over Canada. And on 28 March 2002, a lone gunman attacked the city council in Nanterre, near Paris. 17. For an immense set of references, see the Special Bibliographies for the Suicide Bombers section of the online series called Terrorism, compiled by Glenda Armstrong; www.au.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/terror07.htm is for 2007. 18. See Cindy O. Ness, The Rise in Female Violence, Daedalus 136 (Winter 2007): 84 93, and Mia Bloom, Female Suicide Bombers, Daedalus 136 (Winter 2007): 94 102. Ness edited the anthology Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization (London, 2007). Bloom is the author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York, 2005).
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weapon as perceived in the West. I do not mean that I am discussing public or ofcial reaction to, or emotions concerning, uses of the weapon. I shall be talking about the weapon as conceptualized in Western minds. Thus all that follows is a continuation of part 1, an exploration of some of our collective Western representations of suicide. It is, however, a context that requires more attention to factual information. As a nal disclaimer, I shall avoid sentimental postcolonial breastbeating. Power is violent, and the collapse of absolute power seems to engender absolute violence. It is true that virtually every arsenal that at present includes the suicide weapon has deep roots in a former imperial conquest. I shall mention some details for Sri Lanka later. I shall say almost nothing about Chechnya, except this: After more than a century of battles with tsarist Russia and the new Soviet state, the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic was established in 1936.19 Chechens, seeing the chance to evict Russians, collaborated with the Germans as the lesser of two evil empires. Chechens were massively deported to Central Asia in 1944 and allowed to return only in 1957. After the collapse of the Soviet system, there was intermittent war with the Russians, which continues. After 2000, President Putin vowed to be resolute and allow no space for Chechen independence. After 9/11, he identied this war with the war on terror. There is a strong strategic interest, for although Chechnya is not notably rich in resources, it is the natural site for pipelines for the export of Russian oil. This situation, in which old imperial history and current geopolitical and economic interests conspire, is commonly found in sites where the suicide weapon is used. It is not universal. Sri Lanka has simply fallen off the geopolitical agenda of powerful states. Even India, after a brief and costly attempt at peacekeeping, seems to have decided to leave bad enough alone.
Morally Despicable Acts I shall say once and once only that in no way do I condone or wish to mitigate the use of the suicide weapon for killing civilians going about their daily lives on buses, in markets, or in post ofces. I regard myself as a weak and inconsistent pacist. That allows me to distinguish, for example, killing a lot of civilians with no direct military target in mind from killing a lot of civilians in the course of trying to kill professed enemy combatants, the collateral damage of modern sophistry. Both are loathsome and con19. On the suicide weapon in Chechnya, see, for example, Anne Speckhard and Khapta Ahkmedova, The Making of a Martyr: Chechen Suicide Terrorism, Studies in Conict and Terrorism 29 (June 2006): 429 92.
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trary to values that human beings profess, but they are different. Not that it matters much, to the dead and those who loved them, which of the two was the cause of death. Many forthright critics of war will say there is no difference between killing civilians with suicide bombs and inadvertently killing civilians with high-technology weapons when aiming at military targets. My conventional values lead me to take for granted that there is a difference, even if the line between the two kinds of killing is easily blurred. I regard the deliberate murder of more or less randomly selected passersby, with no military target, as morally despicable.
Weapons Large and Small The suicide weapon can be ruthless and terrifying. It can be callously exploited by older men who have no intention of doing the killing themselves. It can be used by anyone, anywhere. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka developed much of the early technology. Since 2000 the suicide weapon has been used in more than twenty countries and territories, including (to take examples less often noticed) Kashmir, with a great many attacks, and China, with few. The most notorious and the most lethal suicide attack in history was on New York, but there are also suicide attacks on lonely hillsides in Turkish Kurdistan. The suicide weapon is simply an available device. It is the polar opposite of the invincible nuclear weapon. They are in some ways an exact match. Each can be quite precisely targeted, but there is a widespread perception that they are equally indifferent to the people whom they kill. That is how I came to think about the present topic. Many years ago, cold war years, I was asked to write a piece about nuclear weapons and disarmament for an issue of a philosophical magazine. As an old time ban-the-bomber and youthful participant in numerous marches and occasional jailings, I felt I had nothing new to say. But I could not just refuse. So I wrote a piece on what weapons research might be doing to the structure of the ways we nd out about nature. What it might do to the form, to use a tired metaphor, of scientic life in general.20 A Norwegian colleague, concerned that the old questions had too much disappeared from view after the end of the cold war, decided to collect together some old essays and some new ones, to be published in Norwegian. He asked if he could use my old piece and if I would accompany it by a sort of update or second thoughts. That is how I got to suicide, not by
20. See Hacking, Weapons Research and the Form of Scientic Knowledge, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (suppl.) (1986): 327 48.
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continuing in the same vein, but by going to the opposite end of the weapons spectrum. The suicide weapon is the diametrical opposite of the immense and varied technological weaponry of advanced states, the topic of my piece about weapons research. I do not mean only that it is the opposite of nuclear weapons and launching systems. It is also the opposite of the only weapon of mass destruction known to have been in the Mesopotamian region prior to the present war on Iraqthe conventional U.S. twentykiloton bomb that pierces concrete and then explodes to destroy truly deep bunkers. It was probably kept at the ready in Kuwait. For reference, many tactical nuclear weapons are less than ten kilotons. The suicide weapon is equally the opposite of cruise missiles and helicopter gunships, whose technology is seldom mentioned but is awesome. It is the opposite of the next generation of pilotless aircraft, which was a lead story on the front page of the business section of the New York Times. It was about making money. The caption for the accompanying photograph reads, General Atomics planes can rain down bombs while a pilot sits at the controls thousands of miles away.21 And so on. A philosopher who reects on weapons and weapons research needs to think about the lowest technology, which is brought into being, in present asymmetric warfare, to confront such high technology.
Asymmetric Warfare That expression, asymmetric warfare, might suggest a war between two parties, one of which is vastly better armed, equipped, and nanced than the other. David and Goliath. Many guerrilla wars are asymmetric in this sense, even if David is not unanimously admired by nation-state Goliaths. Since the biblical David is the heroic little guy, asymmetric warfare with that connotation does not sound all bad. In the second sense of the expression, asymmetric warfare refers to the present American idea of an armed struggle between a well-dened entity, such as a nation, and an entity or group of entities that is diffuse and has very little in the way of a conventional national or even geographical base. Call this transnational asymmetry. The suicide weapon is effective for the weaker party in both types of asymmetric combat. The rhetoric of the war on terror makes us think of transnational asymmetry, but we should tread warily. Often what is presented as a war between the nation and a diffuse organization is much more like a war
21. Charles Duhigg, The Pilotless Plane That Only Looks Like Childs Play, New York Times, 15 Apr. 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/business/yourmoney/15atomics.html
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between a strong and a weak nation. Talk of transnational asymmetry was initially warranted by the way that al-Qaeda thrust itself on our consciousness, as a being everywhere and nowhere. Some experts believe that the organization is largely in disarray. Others contend that it is still viable and is regrouping in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Either way it remains a powerful idea. Al-Qaeda look-alikes could spring up in many places and probably have. Despite the way that al-Qaeda has been presented in the United States as nonnational and anywhere, its original announced goals were surprisingly like those of an aspiring national power. Get the West out of Saudi Arabia. Get the Israelis out of Palestine. Restore autonomy and unity to the regions once covered by the Ottoman Empire. Reach out to the rest of Islam, including its most populous region, namely, Indonesia. Such national goals are mixed with transnational ambitions and transnational personnel. But nothing is simple. The transnational individuals include people who have inhabited the global cities of the West, such as Paris, Hamburg, London, New York, and Toronto. They are often young people who speak more than one language uently and may be highly cultured. Another group of transnational individuals are the illiterate dispossessed of the earth, such as village lads in Morocco who want to be heroes in the global wars waged at present in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Davids in asymmetric wars have been remarkably successful. The Taliban defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, just as the Vietcong defeated the Americans, not to mention the ignominious American withdrawals from Lebanon and then Somalia. To take present examples where it is not altogether clear what winning a war should actually mean, the national government is not obviously winning in Sri Lanka, any more than the Americans are obviously winning in Iraq or they and their allies are obviously winning in Afghanistan. The idea behind transnational asymmetry, of the West against the diffuse, is partly an artifact of European history and the nation-state. We have xated on the idea that wars should be between nations. The administration of the United States presents itself as a traditional nation asymmetrically confronting a threat that is not another nation. This is then morphed into more pretentious images, such as the conict of civilizations. Without minimizing differences between the good old days and the present, we should not forget that most users of the suicide weapon, even if they are not nation-states, want to be nation-states.22 They have learned
22. This is a primary thesis of Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York, 2005). He tends to suggest that if a battle is national then the issues are
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too well the nineteenth-century European message. They are not notably diffuse. A few examples may suggest the difculties with the concept of asymmetry.
The LTTE The late twentieth-century suicide weapon was developed in the course of an increasingly nasty war of independence in Sri Lanka. The Tamil Tigers have clear national ambitions. They want a Tamil nation of Hindus in the northern part of what was colonial Ceylon, leaving Buddhist Sri Lanka to the south. Even if the northerners are not an accredited nation they are not diffuse. By now they are so powerful in their homeland that they are not exactly David either. The presence and inferior status of the large Tamil population of northern Sri Lanka was a byproduct of colonial rule, starting in 1815. As soon as the British had taken complete control of the island, agribusiness began to import Tamil laborers to create and work tea, coffee, and coconut plantations. The indigenous Buddhist population, with a centuries-long history of high civilization, was thought t for a less menial type of employment. Directly after independence in 1948, the Tamil plantation workers were disenfranchised. During the next twenty-ve years, ethnic conict got worse and worse. The military wing of Tamil rebellion, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, was founded in 1976. In the 1977 election, the separatist party, the Tamil United Liberation Front, took all seats in Tamil areas, and at least one hundred Tamils were killed in subsequent antiTamil riots. Full civil war broke out in 1983. The peacekeeping force sent by India was defeated. Conventional guerrilla war has continued most of the time from then to now. The LTTE pioneered the practice and the technology of the primary suicide weapon, the concealed bomb vest. The Tigers were credited with 168 suicide attacks between 1980 and 2000. The suicide weapon was commonly used in assassinations of political gures. And not only on the island. Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian president, was an early victim, in 1991. As is well known, vest technology was adopted in Lebanon and Palestine by Hamas and Hezbollah, but they have not used it nearly as often as their Tamil models. Nor have they used it with such success in assassinations or with such massively murderous results in public places. One would like to hope that if the relation between North and South
secular, so all that is necessary is to resolve the national problem. That seems to presuppose too Western a conception of the nation.
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would become more symmetric, the suicide weapon would drop out of favor. There is now a modest Tamil naval force. On 26 March 2007, the Tigers launched their rst air attack on a Sri Lankan military base. Diminishing asymmetry might have made the suicide weapon less attractive to the LTTE. Aside from lulls during negotiations and truces, this has not happened. Bombing resumed on 28 November 2007, when sixteen people were killed and thirty-seven injured in a clothing shop. Here is a rough tally from the beginning of 2008 up to the time of revising this essay.23 January 31: three killed, seventeen injured. February 3: seven killed, ninety-seven injured on a train at the main railway station in Colombo. February 24: two men, variously described as political canvassers and as Sri Lankan paramilitary, killed. February 29: two killed and eight injured near the port. March 4: sixty-seven soldiers in a military convoy killed. One should not think of the suicide weapon as a given. Countermeasures evolve, and the weapon in turn evolves.24 Not every bomb is a suicide bomb. On 10 March one person was killed and three were injured by a bomb hidden in a owerpot by a movie theater. Then there are the mines. The signature mine of the LTTE is the Claymorestyle mine using nails and ball bearings.25 On 16 January a mine blew up a bus, after which armed men opened re. Twenty-eight civilian passengers were killed and many more injured. Meanwhile, conventional guerrilla war goes on in the north, with a sizable number of civilians being killed by the national armed forces.
West and Central Asia Until recently we in the West were most aware of the suicide weapon being used during the Palestinian intifada. Once again, it could be seen as a tactic of diffuse organizations against the state of Israel. But it looks much
23. No accuracy is claimed for numbers, which vary according to sources. 24. See Peter Chalk, Tigers Evolve: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelams Developing Suicide Attack Methods, Janes Intelligence Review 19 (Mar. 2007): 14 19. 25. The Claymore anti-personnel mine began with a German World War II idea that was not made operational. It depends on the effect of backing an explosive with a hard panel. It was developed by the Canadian military during the Korean War. The technology attained terrifying perfection in the U.S. The armys M181A model drives 700 little spheres in a 60-degree fan pattern at 4000 feet per second. It has been copied in a great many countries. Its use in landmines is prohibited by the 1997 Ottawa Treaty (Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction) signed by almost all countries except the great powers, namely, China, Russia, India, and the United States. Claymore-style mines are quite easy to make and have long been part of the LTTE arsenal.
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more like a David and Goliath asymmetry. The national aspirations of Palestinians are transparent in principle. Today we are most aware of the suicide weapon deployed in Iraq, yet another case of the failed imposition of the European nation-state. Iraq is a line in the sand drawn by a British administrator around an enormous chunk of the Ottoman Empire, including a great variety of its peoples. The suicide weapon was imported from Palestine early in the second Iraq war. It was soon used not only to attack explicitly military and governmental targets but also for internecine strife. Nevertheless its primary use is to try to get the invaders out. That looks like a national goal, even if we do not yet know what nations will come into being. Western media present the weaker side in the asymmetric war in Afghanistan as diffuse, nonnational. Yet the Taliban, with lots of American support, beat a massive Soviet army and became the national government. The American invasion drove it into hiding and replaced it with what is widely regarded as a puppet state. Only in the middle of 2006 did the Taliban and its allies import the suicide weapon. By September of that year the media were saying, gosh, where are all these suicide attacks coming from all of a sudden? There was a sort of lull during the New Years celebrationsthat is, Nowruz, the Persian New Year in March 2007. This is an arcadian festival with lots of kite-ying and village picnics. But then the attacks recommenced in earnest. Mullah Muhammad Omar is the legendary hero, the man who plucked out his own eye when it was hit by a Russian bullet and himself stitched up the wound, the man who found the cloak of the prophet Muhammad in the legendary nested chests. That may all be glorication, but he is also one of Americas most wanted, with a ten-million-dollar bounty on his head. On 21 April 2007 he instructed his senior and regional commanders that the mujahideen should continue and increase their guerrilla and suicide attacks on occupation forces and the indels will soon run away. He told his ghters to try not to harm innocent civilians during their offensives.26 Here we may once again have asymmetric warfare in the rst sense,
26. Thus said the Taliban commander Mullah Hayatullah Khan, who spoke to Reuters late on 20 April by satellite phone from an undisclosed location (Saeed Ali Achakzai, Talibans Elusive Leader Urges More Suicide Raids, 21 Apr. 2007, www.reuters.com/articlePrint? articleIdUSISL330010). In an earlier interview, 15 November 2001, the BBC asked the questions through a Taliban intermediary over satellite phone. He passed them on to Mullah Omar through a handheld radio and then attached the phones receiver to the radio for his answers. See Interview with Mullah OmarTranscript, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/ 1657368.stm
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David versus Goliath. The David has perfectly well-dened national goals, namely, get the foreigners out of his country. That land was dened as a country in the late nineteenth century by the great powers, the rival empires of Britain and Russia playing the great game. We nd many aspects of the Taliban loathsome and certainly do not think of it as representing a nation. Yet in fact that is its recent historical role. Mullah Omar is the former head of government. There are two reasons that we think of the Taliban as a diffuse and cloudy entity. The rst is the alliance with al-Qaeda, and the second is that many of the suicide bombers are not Afghan but disaffected Saudis. Some come from as far aeld as Morocco. I shall say more about the latter source. Does this make the Taliban diffuse? As a Canadian who deeply regrets my countrys commitment to the war in that region, it strikes me that our side is also a bit diffuse, although in a quite different way. Canada is said to be fullling a NATO obligation. North Atlantic?
Kamikaze What is this suicide weapon? It refers to the use of one or more healthy human beings to carry explosives in order to kill or harm an enemy with the guaranteed certainty that the person attacking will be killed at the same time. I exclude more conventional armed attacks in which the assailants know they are very likely to be killed, but they just might escape. The most usual uses of the suicide weapon are the car bomb, which explodes killing the driver,27 and the vest bomb, which explodes killing the wearer. These involve very little science. Not none. I expect that few of us have any idea how to make a vest stuffed with inconspicuous explosives plus a concealed but reliable detonator. Car bombs that used to be gelignite connected to the starter now involve a lot of work in a body shop, which ostensibly xes fender-benders, in order to hollow out and rebuild the chassis so that it can store large amounts of explosives that escape detection. I said that the point of the suicide weapon is to kill or harm an enemy, but that is massively ambiguous. The French word for a suicide bomber or at least the standard word in the mediais kamikaze. This infuriates Japanese, who insist that kamikaze pilots always had specic military targets and killed only combatants. Moreover, they were chiey used when the war in the Pacic was becoming increasingly asymmetric. The social status of kamikaze pilots was pretty much the same as the famed pilots in the Battle of Britain, a young and
27. See Mike Davis, Budas Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York, 2007).
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independent-minded elite from old families and the aristocracy with rather conventional loyalties to their nation and their social class. Altogether too many suicide bombers have deliberately murdered innocent civilians; they are not kamikaze by the Japanese denition. The distinction is valid but with no sharp edges. It is sometimes useful to distinguish kamikaze and terror bomber. The car bomber who killed nine American soldiers near a patrol base, 23 April 2007, was a kamikaze. An example of a terror bomber is the one who, on 13 April 2007, blew up near a bus terminal in Karbala, a Shiite center, killing 36 people and wounding 168. In Sri Lanka, the 4 March 2008 LTTE attack that killed 67 soldiers was kamikaze. The 3 February 2008 attack on a suburban train pulling into the main station was terror. Many terror attacks do not deploy the suicide weaponfor example, the attack, previously mentioned, of 16 January 2008, in which a bus was mined and then the passengers red on. Kamikazes kill combatants or hit military targets. This is not such a clear notion. Maybe it never was. On 16 April 2007 a suicide bomber in northern Afghanistan killed nine policemen and injured sixteen others. Policemen, in our view, are civilians. They are not civilians from the point of view of Mullah Omar. When he told his commanders to try to avoid killing civilians he was not referring to police working for the government. Are members of a parliament that you deem to be a puppet of the occupying power to be regarded as civilians? Yes, we say, but not everyone agrees. Turning again to Sri Lanka, despite the gruesome bombs in public places, a majority of targets of the Tamil Tigers have been military and political. There have been many assassinations that are intended not to weaken a military force but to destabilize the government and make it appear powerless. They cannot be counted as kamikaze attacks; they are terror. In a notorious recent example, 28 November 2007, an apparently handicapped woman bomber exploded outside the ofce of a government minister who leads the nonviolent Tamil party in the Sri Lankan government, the Eelam Peoples Democratic Party. He was unscathed but two employees were killed. She was captured on lm calmly talking to clerks before opening her blouse and exploding. One side will call this attack on a politician plain terror. The other side will call it failed kamikaze with collateral damage. (Yes, the LTTE public relations people have adopted the American euphemism of collateral damage.)
Only One of Many Weapons From a military point of view the suicide weapon is not very different from other smallish weapons. A hand grenade is not in principle more or
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less lethal than most suicide weapons. For slightly more potent weapons, a suicide car bomb may be very similar to an ordinary car bomb, which may be a form of what is now called an improvised explosive device. To call them improvised is to play the transnational asymmetry card. It suggests that those who use them are not proper nation-states who abide by the rules. Serious states manufacture their own weapons or buy them from arms dealers or directly from fellow states. Only a ragbag of a contemptible enemy has to improvise. The rhetoric is hollow. A truly improvised weapon is made up on the spur of the moment; Sheila pulls out a drawer from her desk, upends its contents, and uses this wooden object to threaten the lout who has burst into her ofce. What if the IED is an artisanal copy of the American Claymore M181A? That is not exactly improvised. Battered old vans skillfully rebuilt in body shops to conceal and contain explosives in innocentlooking vehicles may be artisanal, but they are certainly not improvised. There are important differences between suicide weapons and concealed bombs. Suicide bombers can go places that are heavily guarded and inspected. Kamikaze bombers can get inside military units by imposture or can get close to important political gures in ways that planted bombs can seldom do. Terror bombers can board buses; in a vigilant community a bomb-in-a-backpack left on the bus is likely to be noticed and intercepted. So suicide does have a tactical advantage for some purposes. A classic example of the two kinds of weapons is furnished by two coordinated events in Baghdad on 12 April 2007. There was the explosion in a cafe in the Iraqi parliament. It killed at least two members of parliament, plus six other employees, and wounded many more, including eleven parliamentarians. We call it terror, others might call it kamikaze with collateral damage, but it was certainly suicide. It coincided with the explosion of the great bridge spanning the Tigris, the last easy link between the two parts of the city. That bomb may have killed no one, but people wept to see the last symbol of stability in ruins. The bomb, described as a truck bomb, exploded in the early hours of the morning. It was almost certainly not a suicide, but it was a terror attack intended to demoralize a population. These were two successfully deployed weapons. The rst was almost of necessity a suicide weapon; the second had no need of suicide. That is the only military difference. The kamikaze car bomb that killed the nine young Americans in Iraq on 23 April 2007 had the same military effect as the IED car bomb that blew up six young Canadians in Afghanistan a fortnight earlier. From the perspective of the dead and injured victims, there is no difference between a suicide bomb and a nonsuicide bomb.
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The Media Japanese landscape gardeners speak of borrowed scenery. Nowadays almost any lethal suicide bombing intends to use borrowed technology, namely, the media. Take the explosion in the Iraqi parliament on the same day as the destruction of the bridge over the Tigris. By accident the media were on hand, for a local TV station was interviewing an MP and had dramatic footage of the carnage. The BBC ran a story with interviews to illustrate that locals were less impressed than Washington by the event, for they cared little about a direct assault on the government. What have [those deputies] ever done for us? What I care about are all the ordinary people who get blown to pieces every day.28 Destroying the bridge, in contrast, did cut to the quick. Both events were terror attacks. Even if the targets in parliament were politicians deemed to be enemy, the point was to show the ability to wreak carnage in protected places. Thanks to the media, these two orchestrated events were around the world in no time. It was a rare recent pair of bombings for which an al-Qaeda (or look-alike) group claimed responsibility. Al-Qaeda has been brilliant at staging media events. Their one great appalling triumph, 9/11, was two things: unspeakable murder and nonstop media. It borrowed the worlds media technology with a vengeance. Bombers kill. But killing people is not the primary use of the terror suicide weapon. The aim is to frighten a whole population by dramatically killing, at times and places that cannot be predicted. The weapon usually kills a small number of people, but the alleged point is to encourage the population and its government to change its policies. Contemporary news media are borrowed in order to magnify the effects of any incident. Here, then, is another distinction between kamikaze warriors and terror bombers. It is essential to the efcacy of terror that it become well-known not only in the village but also in the global village. It needs the news media. That is much less true of kamikaze warriors. Thanks to television and the internet, the war on terror is indeed, as advertised by the American administration, a global war. It is not to be forgotten that war waged by a nation with conventional weapons may also be intended to terrorize a population into submission. It can be argued that the Blitz on England, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, or the restorms started in Dresden and Hamburg were intended to terrorize the population as much as to destroy military targets. The Amer28. Jim Muir, Symbolic Strike at Iraqi Sanctum, BBC News, 13 Apr. 2007, news.bbc.co.uk/go/ pr/fr/-/2/hi/ middle_east/6551297.stm
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ican invasion of Iraq was nicknamed Shock and Awe. That is virtually a synonym for terror.
Cowards and Heroes Try saying the following:

In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesdays slaughter they were not cowards. The radical but greatly respected philosophical writer Susan Sontag wrote exactly that in The New Yorker directly after the attack on the Trade Center and the Pentagon. She was appalled by the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public gures and TV commentators.29 She was ruthlessly denounced, virtually for treason. The attackers had been reviled as mad, perverted, and cowardly. I shall speak to madness in a moment, but rst cowardice. After the 12 April 2007 attack on the Iraqi parliament building, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Ahmad Saleh said, This is a cowardly act.30 Would it have been heroic if the assailants had announced their intentions and then inltrated with machine guns rst to cut down the armed guards? I suppose it would have been less an act of terror, if an element of terror is to attack without warning. So the bomber was more of a terrorist, but would there be any reason for his party to think of him as less of a hero? Scott Atran is an anthropologist who does in-depth interviews with nondead bomberswho have been caught and jailed, those who are part of the bombers infrastructure, and people in neighborhoods.31 His rst work was in Israel, his more recent work in Indonesia and Malaysia. He has also studied Tetua n, Morocco, on the border with the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. He and his group went there to follow the trail of the Madrid n want to be heroes. The bombers.32 Atran reports that the youths in Tetua
29. Susan Sontag et al., The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, 24 Sept. 2001, www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924ta_talk_wtc. She and ve other writers for the New Yorker were asked for an immediate reaction to the events. I do not agree with her that courage is a morally neutral virtue. Otherwise, her three succinct paragraphs are a marvel of incisive prose. Some of us may have thought what she wrote, but who else could have written it? 30. Edward Wong and Christine Hauser, Insurgent Group Says It Bombed Iraqi Parliament, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2007, p. A1. 31. A book from a different point of view, also based on interviews in Israeli jails, is Anat Berko, The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers (Westport, Conn., 2007). Berko served previously in the Israeli Defense Forces. 32. See Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, and Richard Davis, Terror Networks and Sacred Values: Synopsis of Report MadridMoroccoHamburgPalestineIsraelSyria (2007), www.sitemaker.umich.edu/Satran/les/synopsis_atran_sageman_nsc_brief_28_march_2007.pdf
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most heroic thing in all the world to do, now, is to blow up American soldiers. Those who pass their training conrm themselves as potential heroes; those who knew them remember them as heroes. They are not my heroes, but, whatever may be said of them, they are not cowards.
Transnational Bombers I may add that Atran and his colleagues found a pipeline of bombers from Tetua n to Afghanistan. As many as forty dead bombers in Afghanistan may have come from Tetua n. Last year, Moroccan authorities had already conrmed sixteen by DNA. This adds to the perception of the enemy as diffuse. Perhaps it also fuels the rhetoric of the conict of civilizations; Americans draw on their pool of friendly regions to bolster their war in Afghanistan, while the Taliban call on their pool of friendly regions for the same purpose. It costs about six thousand dollars to transfer a lad from Tetua n to Kabul. People are passed along a line that often is a drug route in reverse. It is all informal, but it works pretty well. The analogy to the Silk Road is often made; it is a complex organism that runs itself, much like the market in liberal economics. There is no evidence of a specically al-Qaeda organization along the line, no evidence of a master plan or mastermind. It is more like the invisible hand; it seems to be the most efcient example of free-market economics in the region. Martyrs We have come to use the word martyr rather casually. Anyone can be a martyr for any cause; good women are martyred doing their duty to bad men. But the word does have religious connotations. Martyrs play a major role in both Christian and Muslim history. Saints and martyrs are still commemorated by Catholics. Shiites venerate in particular the third Imam as a martyr; he is commemorated for a month. Sunni martyrs are those who were close to the prophet and died in his battles against indels. But their martyrs are like most Christian ones, ritually commemorated and held up for admiration rather than emulation. The active Islamic martyr was reinvented in Iran for the war with Iraq, 1980 1988. Iraq was abetted by the U.S. as a counterweight to Iran. The technology was European World War I, trenches and barbed wire. Nobody
For earlier contributions, see, for example, Scott Atran, Mishandling Suicide Terrorism, Washington Quarterly 27 (Summer 2004): 6790, which includes references to many relevant sources in English.
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knows how many men were killed in battle and the aftermath of wounds. The gure of a million is bandied about. A great many young men and teenagers became Shiite martyrs on the Iranian side. These were not suicides, though the chances of survival at the front were dim. They were hailed as heroes and martyrs. Innumerable kids signed up in pride and died valiantly. The martyr idea was soon taken up by Hezbollah in Lebanon, in the conict with Israel. It merged with the suicide weapon, imported from Sri Lanka. And so we got suicide bombers who were Islamic martyrs. Sunnis followed suit.33 The act of killing oneself for whatever personal reason is forbidden by Islamic law, just as it is in Christian codes. As I said in part 1, it is far from clear what specic historical factors made antisuicide rules a commonplace in the religious canons of people of the Book. Many thoughtful Muslims, including ones who denounce the use of the suicide weapon, accept that those who use the weapon are martyrs and therefore not suicides. This is not a peculiarly Islamic casuistry. Martyr was a Christian concept long before the emergence of Islam. It literally meant to bear witness. Many young suicide bombers would be glad to hear themselves described not only as heroes but also as bearing witness. Here is a characteristically many-barbed remark of Nietzsches: Christianity and suicide.When Christianity came into existence the inclination to suicide was very strongChristianity turned it into a lever of its power: it allowed only two kinds of suicide, dressed them up with the highest dignity and the highest hopes and forbade all others in a terrible manner. But martyrdom and the ascetics slow suicide were permitted.34 Was he right to say that the inclination to suicide was strong in Rome? Perhaps. Recall Humes list of noble suicides. There was a standing story of communities that predated Rome: the cohort of age sixty was feted and honored, and then it went off to a quiet grove to take hemlock. The telling of such taleswhether they be true or falsesuggests a pretty relaxed attitude toward suicide. The martyrs of the early church were portrayed as passive. The classical
33. This is a disgracefully short synopsis. See Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allahs New Martyrs, trans. David Macey (London, 2005), where he describes the martyr concept as always being associated with a radical political agenda. Khosrokhavar is an Iranianborn French scholar of recent and contemporary Iran, author of many books, who in 2008 is visiting at Yale. 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josene Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge, 2001), 131, p. 123.
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paintings of young Saint Sebastian tied to a tree, blissfully meditating and dreamily gazing up at heavenwhile deadly arrows are shot into his relaxed bodyare like caricatures of what the martyr is supposed to be. Those who use the suicide weapon are, in contrast, not patient but agents. They kill, or destroy materiel, in the course of blowing themselves up. Western society will not call such people martyrs, but it wholly accepts the mode of casuistry that presents a suicide bomber as a martyr.
Women The conception of suicide bombers as primarily young men was never right. America focused on Israel, and it is true that most Palestinian bombers were male. Their age distribution was not so very different from that for hockey players or soldiers. They were from the high-risk group mentioned earlier, high risk for everything, young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-ve. The focus on Israel is misleading. The Kurdistan Workers Party uses women as often as men in kamikaze attacks on the Turkish military. The Tamil Tigers have or had a special female suicide unit, the Birds of Freedom. At least a third of LTTE attacks have been by women. This continues. Women made several of the attacks listed above in the rst quarter of 2008. The Black Widows of Chechnya are indeed widows, who clearly state that their motive is revenge. The rst bomber photographed in the act, last November in Colombo, was a woman. The rst known woman to use the suicide weapon was a kamikaze on 9 April 1985; working for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, she used a truck bomb in Lebanon to kill two Israeli soldiers. The one and only Palestinian suicide bomber who is a person (or perhaps a personality) for the Western media was also a womanthat is, the law student Hanadi Jaradat, who killed twenty-one Israelis at Maxims restaurant in Tel Aviv. Whatever motives she may have had, revenge for the killing of male family members must have been among them. But personal revenge is not in general a motive for the use of the suicide weapon. There are now books and articles that talk about women bombers.35 One of the rst was by an Israeli novelist and journalist, Barbara Victor.
35. Berko, The Path to Paradise, has a good deal to say about imprisoned female Palestinians whom she interviewed. Another Israeli study is Female Suicide Bomber: Dying for Equality? ed. Yoram Schweitzer (Tel Aviv, 2006). For a feminist reection about the same conict, see Claudia Brunner, Female Suicide BombersMale Suicide Bombing? Looking for Gender in Reporting the Suicide Bombings of the Israeli-Palestinian Conict, Global Society 19, no. 1 (2005): 29 48. The use of the suicide weapon by individual Lebanese, Kurdish, Tamil, Palestinian, and Chechen women is discussed by sociologist Rosemarie Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers (Jefferson, N.C., 2006).
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She wrote about the rst six female Palestinian bombers. She pieced together intimate details of their personal lives. They were not happy or fullled lives. Indeed they sound depressingly like the lives of many middle-class young women in industrial societies. Victor uses what often looks like ordinariness to explain what they did.36 Jacqueline Rose dryly observed that slowly and painstakingly, Victor has turned these women from martyrs into suicides. The trouble with Victors story, says Rose, is that in the telling not one of these women is truly the political agent of her own life.37 Rose suggests that many people are especially upset by young women in the role of bombers because women are supposed to be nurturing, to desire roles other than domination and destruction. To adapt the words of Carol Gilligan, they should speak in a different voice from men.38 It is a common refrain among experts who discuss female use of the suicide weapon that there is something emotionally disturbed about the women or that the society in which they live is disabling feminine virtues. It is of course a sort of solace for a society attacked by women bombers to learn that there is something wrong with them or that female suicide bombers seek atonement.39 But that is part of a mistaken imposition of individualistic conceptions on a social weapon. In my opinion, we should heed Rose and allow women the privilege of martyrdom just as much as men. There are of course reasons to expect men to be suicide bombers. There is a human universal mentioned in part 1. Most acts of direct violence anywhere in the world and its history are perpetrated by men in that highrisk group, 16 25. There is the evolutionary-psychology explanation of that. With less fashionable science and more old-time wisdom we can say the same thing: young men want to be heroes. That is especially true of the disenfranchised lads of Tetua n. The preponderance of males among Islamic bombers has a further explanation. Many of the bombers are selected and trained in religious
36. See Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus, Pa., 2003). See also Debra D. Zedalis, Female Suicide Bombers (Carlisle Barracks, Pa., 2004). Zedalis has had a distinguished civilian career in the U.S. Army, most recently as director of the Installation Management Command, Pacic Region. According to her Army CV, her entire career has been spent in installation management in the United States, Europe, and now the Pacic. 37. Jacqueline Rose, Deadly Embrace, review of My Life as a Weapon by Christoph Reuter and Army of Roses by Victor, London Review of Books, 4 Nov. 2004, www.lrb.co.uk/v26/ n21/print/rose01_.html 38. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Womens Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). 39. See Female Suicide Bombers Seek Atonement, Israel News, 1 Oct. 2006, www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3198362,00.html, which reports on a talk by Bloom.
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schools that only men may enter. The word madrasah is now quite widely used in journalism in English, referring to Islamic schools. The word means school, secular or religious. There are endless kinds of madrasahs, some of which do exactly the same job as seminaries or yeshivas. That is, they train experts in the religion. But many more madrasahs are vehicles for transmitting all aspects of knowledge, with an emphasis on the faith. Some of these have been exploited to select young men who might become suicide warriors and gradually to direct them to that destination. The trainers of bombers use the schools as part of a system to exploit. There is another obvious reason why there should be more men than women using the suicide weapon in Iraq. It would be just plain dangerous for a young woman to head out on the reverse Silk Road from Tetua n to Afghanistan, being passed along partly by drug trafckers. Or maybe notthere is honor among merchants but it is not what a decent girl would do. To counter the above considerations, women are very desirable as bombers. They are less suspected, and moral codes limit the types of searches that may be made. We know something about the support systems for young men, some of whom announce their plans to the family and village to great applause and celebration. We know virtually nothing about the social network within which females are trained and deployed to use the suicide weapon.
Not Crazy Every weapon, in the larger sense of the word, includes its delivery system, to use the usual euphemism. One good delivery system for the suicide weapon includes not only a youth with a loaded vest but also the tight-knit network that provides the training, the loyalty, the explosives, the vest, and the after-bomb support for the bombers family. In Islam, the madrasahs provide some of the support system for the present generation. Aside from the fact that Islamic bombers are mostly young men, none of the other cliche s despair, madness, or paradiseare correct. An observation common to every expert is that there is no evidence of psychopathology in suicide bombers; the incidence is probably less than in the corresponding general population. No surprise, because bombers have to be selected. Just imagine that you decided you wanted to be a suicide bomber for a worthy cause. Where would you go for advice? Most of the people I personally would seek out would turn me down at rst sight. Careful training and selection is the key to an effective suicide weapon. Neither intellectuals nor crazies make it through the rst lter. Although religion is of para-
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mount importance to West Asian and North African bombers, the marvelous sex-afterlife of martyrs is largely a gment of Western orientalism. To say the least, love life in Paradise is severely platonic. Every Islamic authority who has been cited agrees that a volunteer motivated either by fantasy or by despair would be immediately rejected. Since a rigorous regime and intensive training are essential parts of a good delivery system, the picking, testing, and evaluation of volunteers is usually a long-term and studied process. Sexually frustrated fantasists need not apply.
Not a Kind of Person There is always the attraction of trying to prole bombers, along the lines of criminal proling.40 Suicide bombers are rare animals, like serial killers; we prole the latter with some success, why not the former? For an obvious reason: serial killers are loners. A suicide in the West is also taken to be the act of a lone individual. The suicide weapon is a social tool. Those who actually blow themselves up work within a rich social support network, whether it is primarily secular, as in Sri Lanka, or relies heavily on religious training, as in the case of some but by no means all Muslim bombers. Attempts at proling may yield useful information, but the attempt may be not only ineffective but also misguided. Even when restricted to a single conict, as for example Palestine, proling has been a rather futile exercise. There are important statistics, such as age and sex distributions, but there are no groups of characteristics to pick out subclasses of bombers that distinguish them from the general population. The chief commonalities lie in what they are not: they are not in general dispossessed, crazy, ill-educated, or even poor. And that of course was worth nding out. A useful sourcebook by Christoph Reuter begins by stating that we need to know what kind of people the modern bombers are.41 If that simply means, do they tend to be old or young, fat or thin, dark brown or light brown, the question makes some sort of sense. But the question is posed in such a way that it implies that suicide bombers are a particular kind of people, that there is such a thing as the suicide bomber. That seems a natural question chiey because of our own attitudes to
40. For discussion, see, for example, David Lester, Bijou Yang, and Mark Lindsay, Suicide Bombers: Are Psychological Proles Possible? Studies in Conict and Terrorism 27 (July 2004): 28395, and E. R. Bertoli, Proling Martyr Bombers: A Behavioral Optometric Perspective, Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security International 12 (Summer 2006): 44 48. 41. See Reuter, My Life as a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton, N.J., 2004).
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suicide; we study certain types of depression as predisposing to suicide, and we have theories about attempted suicide and when a person can be suicidal. I have already expressed reservations about the suicidal person. Bombers are not a kind of person (in that way) at all. There are no true statements of the form the suicide bomber is . . . except what arises directly from the denition, that the suicide bomber is someone who deliberately kills himself while trying to cause massive unpredicted harm to others. Yet the suicide bomber has almost become a kind of person, as in titles like A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber.42 I merely deplore the label, the suicide bomber. This book paints a valuable multifaceted account of the Gaza Strip, where the American authors worked for several years. It importantly illustrates an ignored aspect of the Gaza world by including many photographs of grafti (with translations). This is a rare case in which a few pictures are worth thousands of words.
Poverty There are of course local generalizations to be made, for example, that most Palestinian bombers were educated, youngish, male, and from the middle classes. When successful Hamas bombers are sorted by educational level, the largest group has a college education. Those who never completed high school number only 6 percent. In another part of the world, a Singapore parliamentary report on Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist organization, stated that these men were not ignorant, destitute or disenfranchised outcasts. . . . Like many of their counterparts in militant Islamic organisations in the region, they held normal, respectable jobs. . . . As a group, most of the detainees regarded religion as their most important personal value.43 The prosperous status of many suicide bombers does not mean that economic motivation is irrelevant. Relative deprivation is often what affects rebels most. For example, because of a population explosion, the number of young men in each age cohort in North Africa and West Asia is far larger than the cohorts above it. But opportunities have not much increased. Hence the well-educated young have far fewer chances than their seniors did. They are richer and better qualied than their parents were, but there are relatively fewer places for them to go. The cynic can say that when career choices for the upwardly mobile become severely constrained, training to be a bomber does not get automatically excluded.
42. See Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (Oxford, 2005). 43. Ministry of Home Affairs (Singapore), White Paper: The Jemaah Islamiyah Arrests and the Threat of Terrorism (Singapore, 2003), p. 15.
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But none of these generalizations apply to the new wave we are seeing in Afghanistan. Many of those coming from places like Tetua n are poor and ill educated. They do not want to be martyrs. They want to be heroes.
Training The most important feature of what I have been calling the delivery system is the demand on bombers in training that there be absolute commitment to an ideology, be it to a faith or to a nation. Commitment to a faith is one of the strongest types of human bond. A training system may be devoted to spiritual instruction in which weapons handling is incidental to the creation of loyalty above self. Of course that is standard for modern conventional armies: boot camp is for molding character and camaraderie, not only for learning how to shoot. The religious schools have been a rich resource in recruiting. One may have the view that the suicide weapon has two edges, one the individual bombers and the other the organization and its managers. One may also have the view that the evil resides in the managers. To deploy a nuclear bomb, you need a vast delivery system, even to put it in a freighter and explode it in a major harbor. It is believed that at present no terrorist group could get it all together without something amounting to the resources of a small nation-state. The delivery system of a suicide weapon is not demanding in that way. It demands other types of resources. It needs a system of education that ensures absolute commitment and delity. The loyalty within the cells may well be similar to the internal loyalty of small battleeld groups who will die for each other (and perhaps for no one else). The managers of such groups, that is, in conventional military terms, the ofcers, strive mightily to ensure such loyalty. The potential for such loyalty may be a human universal, and its exploitation in asymmetric warfare may be little different from its exploitation in symmetric warfare (between two more or less equal units). It is presumed that the largely secular forces of the LTTE (secular despite the fact that this war is Hindus versus Buddhists) achieve the commitment needed to deploy a suicide weapon without the benet of religious training. Since the West cares little about that war, Western experts have expressed few views on what makes the Tamil suicide weapon work. Psychosocial Aims I began by saying that the suicide weapon is the exact opposite of todays truly amazing military weapons. It does not contrast only as low technology to high. It contrasts as psychosocial in both means and effects, as opposed to material in both means and effects.
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Military weapons are material and aim at destroying other military materiel, which includes the esh and bones of enemy soldiers as well as the metal and concrete of rival weapons and defense systems. The terror suicide weapon in contrast is grounded in a psychological and social structure and aims at psychological and social effects call them dread of the explosion that cannot be anticipated. Kamikaze weapons are of their nature between conventional military weapons and terror weapons. I do not underestimate the sheer terror produced when a modern military machine launches an assault. Shock and awe: the aim was military conquest by psychological and social means, namely, the fear that is induced by omnipotent weaponry. The same is true in a more local way. Consider what happens when a modern military engine is deployed, say, to retake Fallujah. A dangerous one hundred metres of street is rst of all smashed by very low-ying aircraft, and then, if resistance continues, it is attened by re from the ground. That is terrifying; talk about psychological and social effects. And of course the deployment of these weapons demands social and psychological resources, namely, well-trained and battle-hardened troops, with heavy metal rock music pounding from the earphones they are wearing in order to keep out the noise of battle and to maintain the adrenaline. There are, however, major differences among the ways in which social and psychological means can aim at achieving social and psychological ends. In asymmetric warfare, standard military weapons aim to overwhelm an enemy by showing we can do this against this specied target, and we can do it over and over again, whenever we choose, against any target that displays resistance to our arms.44 Military weapons are deployed against dened and predictable targets in a terrifying way. The terror suicide weapon is scary precisely because it is not deployed against a predictable target. It aims at terrifying an enemy population in order to change its policies by showing we can do this against a random target any time we like, and we can keep on doing it anytime we like. It induces dread because one can never tell where the suicide weapon might next be deployed. Both kinds of weapons can fail miserably. The military weapon may fail because its enemy may just not scare easily. In British folklore the London Blitz is an example. When the overpowering military force is perceived to be well-intentionedsoftand to engage in local shock-and-awe de44. This is the logic of relatively symmetric nuclear warfare, too, and hence the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. But it is not the logic of conventional warfare between relative equals, in which one power, after one local victory, can by no means guarantee the same success next time round.
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struction only with regret, it may produce fear in innocent bystanders but not enough fear in a dispersed and mobile guerrilla enemy. The kamikaze weapon may or may not be effective, just like any other conventional weapon. The terror suicide weapon may fail because the population is not cowed just as European populations were not cowed by the nonsuicide but still unpredictable attacks of the Red Brigades (Italy), Baader-Meinhof (Germany), and the IRA (England and Ulster). Certainly the Israeli population and its government have not been cowed by repeated uses of the suicide weapon. Despite the parallels that must be made, the military weapon is based on the efcient application of technologies to materials and is used for immediate material ends. The terror suicide weapon is based on psychosocial structures, making use of minimal material technology, and it is used for immediate psychosocial ends. This adds a new poignancy to the expression asymmetric warfare. We may say that the two kinds of weapon are asymmetric because they work in and by different mediums, namely, the material and the psychosocial. The suicide weapon might even be called countermilitary. In the present state of affairs, we should think about supreme military weapons hand-in-hand with their exact contrary, the supreme countermilitary weapon.

Hacking - The Suicide Weapon

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The Suicide Weapon

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Cowards and Heroes Try saying the following:

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008

Ian Hacking / The Suicide Weapon

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