Email: Nader Hashemi
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 22:55:23 -0400
Title: Robert Fisk on Suicide Bombers
TEXT:
The Independent
Thursday, September 13, 2001
They can run and they can hide. Suicide bombers are here to stay
By Robert Fisk
Not long before the Second World War, Stanley Baldwin, who was
Britain's Prime Minister, warned that "the bomber will always get
through". Today, we can argue that the suicide bomber will always
get through. Maybe not all of them. We may never know how many
other hijackers failed to board domestic flights in the United
States on Tuesday morning, but enough to produce carnage on an
awesome, incomprehensive scale. Yet still we have not begun to
address this phenomenon. The suicide bomber is here to stay. It is
an exclusive weapon that belongs to "them" not us, and no military
power appears able to deal with this phenomenon.
Partly because of the suicide bomber, the Israelis fled Lebanon.
Specifically because of a suicide bomber, the Americans fled
Lebanon 17 years earlier. I still remember Vice-President George
Bush, now George Bush Senior, visibly moved amid the ruins of the
US Marine base in Beirut, where 241 American servicemen had just
been slaughtered. "We are not going to let a bunch of insidious
terrorist cowards, shake the foreign policy of the United States,"
he told us. "Foreign policy is not going to be dictated or changed
by terror." A few months later, the Marines upped sticks and ran
away from Lebanon, "redeployed" to their ships offshore.
Not long ago, I was chatting to an Indian soldier, a veteran of
Delhi's involvement in the Sri Lanka war now serving with the UN in
southern Lebanon. How did the Tamil suicide bombers compare those
of the Lebanese Hizbollah I asked him? The soldier raised his
eyebrows. "The Hizbollah has nothing on those guys," he said. "Just
think, they all carry a suicide capsule. I told my soldiers to
drive at 100 miles an hour on the roads of Sri Lanka in case one of
them hurled himself into the jeep." The Hizbollah may take their
inspiration from the martyrdom of the prophet Hussain, and the
Palestinian suicide bombers may take theirs from the Hizbollah.
But there is no military answer to this. As long as "our" side will
risk but not give its lives (cost-free war, after all, was partly
an American invention) the suicide bomber is the other side's
nuclear weapon. That desperate, pitiful phone call from the
passenger on her way to her doom in the Boeing 767 crash on the
Pentagon told her husband that the hijackers held knives and
box-cutters. Knives and box-cutters; that's all you need now to
inflict a crashing physical defeat on a superpower. That and a
plane with a heavy fuel load.
But the suicide bomber does not conform to a set of identical
characteristics. Many of the callow Palestinian youths blowing
themselves to bits, with, more often than not, the most innocent of
Israelis, have little or no formal education. They have poor
knowledge of the Koran but a powerful sense of fury, despair and
self-righteousness to propel them. The Hizbollah suicide bombers
were more deeply versed in the Koran, older, often with years of
imprisonment to steel them in the hours before their immolation.
Tuesday's suicide bombers created a precedent. If there were at
least four on each aircraft, this means 16 men decided to kill
themselves at the same time. Did they all know each other?
Unlikely. Or did one of them know all the rest? For sure, they were
educated. If the Boeing which hit the Pentagon was being flown by
men with knives (presumably, the other three aircraft were too)
then these were suicide bombers with a good working knowledge of
the fly-by-wire instrument panel of one of the world's most
sophisticated aircraft.
I found it oddly revealing when, a few hours later, an American
reporter quizzed me about my conviction that these men must have
made "dummy runs", must have travelled the same American Airlines
and United Airlines scheduled flights many times. They would have
to do that at least to check the X-ray security apparatus at
airports. How many crew, the average passenger manifest, the
average delays on departure times. They needed to see if the cabin
crew locked the flight deck door. In my experience on US domestic
flights this is rare. Savage, cruel these men were, but also, it
seems, educated.
Like so many of our politicians who provide us with the same tired
old promises about hunting down the guilty and, Mr Blair's
contribution yesterday, "dismantle the machine of terror". But this
misses the point. If the machinery is composed of knives and
box-cutters, Mr Blair is after the wrong target. Just as President
Ronald Reagan was in the hours before he ordered the bombing of
Libya in 1986. "He can run, but he can't hide," he said of Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi. But Colonel Gaddafi could hide, and he is still
with us.
Instead of searching for more rogue states, President George W
Bush's reference to those who stand behind the bombers opens the
way for more cruise missiles aimed at Iraq or Afghanistan, or
wherever he thinks the "godfathers of terrorism may be". The
Americans might do better to find out who taught these vicious men
to fly a Boeing 767.
Which Middle East airlines train their pilots for this aircraft?
Indeed which nations are generous in their pilot-training schemes
for Third World countries? I recall one of Iran's best
post-revolutionary helicopter pilots telling me he was given a full
course on the Bell Augusta (the Vietnam-era gunship) by the
Pakistan air force, which itself paid retired American pilots to
teach them.
And if Osama bin Laden is behind the New York massacre, it's worth
remembering one of his aims: not just to evict the US from the
Middle East but to overthrow the Arab regimes loyal to Washington.
Saudi Arabia was top of the list when I last spoke to him, but
President Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Jordan, ruled by King Abdullah
II, were among his other enemies. He would keep talking about how
the Muslims of these nations would rise up against their corrupt
rulers. A slaughter by the US in retaliation for the New York and
Washington bloodbaths might just move the Arab masses from stubborn
docility to the point of detonation.
Within the region, the suicide bomber is now admired. Not because
he is a mass killer but because something invincible, something
untouchable, something that has always dictated the rules without
taking responsibility for the results, has now proved vulnerable.
It was the same when the first suicide bombers struck in Lebanon.
The Lebanese could scarcely believe that Israeli soldiers could die
on this scale. The Israeli army of song and legend had been brought
low. So, too, the reaction when the symbols of America's pride and
power were struck. The vile, if small, Palestinian "celebrations"
were a symptom of this, albeit unrepresentative. They matched the
"bomb Baghdad into the Dark Ages" rhetoric we heard from the
American public a decade ago.
In the Middle East, Arabs now fear America will strike them without
waiting for proof, or act on the most flimsy of evidence. For it is
as well to remember how the US responded to the 1983 Marine
bombings. The battleship USS New Jersey fired its automobile-sized
shells into the Chouf Mountains, killing a couple of Syrian
soldiers and erasing half a village. The arrival of US naval craft
off the American East Coast yesterday was a ghostly replay of this
impotent event.
But to this day, the Americans have never discovered the identity
of the man who drove a truck-load of explosives into the Beirut
Marine compound. That was in another country, in another time.
Today's suicide bombers are a different breed. Nurtured in whatever
despair or misery or perhaps even privilege, in 2001, the suicide
bomber came of age.
