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| 5/23 |
| 2007/7/3-5 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq, Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Others] UID:47153 Activity:kinda low |
7/2 So the bombers in England were doctors. Popular leftist wisdom is
that Muslims are desperate because of the poor conditions they
live in and their lack of education. If only we worked hard to
improve their conditions, then they would not grow up to be suicide
bombers, goes the thinking, because they would have something to
live for. Now that MDs are blowing themselves up can we at least
begin to consider that perhaps religious wars are not rational?
\_ Popular leftist wisdom is that religious people are nutters,
not that Muslim's are desperate because they are poor. Did you
invent that straw man all by yourself?
\_ Actually, I've heard many people (including my law profs) say
that if there was more prosperity for the ordinary people in
the middle east there would be less suicide bombings, &c. and
thus the sol'n to the problem is to improve conditions over
there for (i.e. create a middle class, to promote stability).
I do not know what the factual, historic or economic theory
basis is for this assertion, but I have heard it before from
self-described "lefties." -!op
\_ Isn't that the neocon argument? If we just give them the
trappings of US-style capitalism, they will luv us forever
and want to be just like us?
\_ You forgot the part where we knock the shit out of them
first to show them who's best.
\_ No, it isn't. The left isn't saying they need our
economic system, just our prosperity.
\_ I guess you're right, although that makes no sense at
all. -!pp
\_ It makes sense if you believe that there are other
ways to achieve economic prosperity.
\_ Sure, but name one that's proven to work as well.
\_ It depends a lot on what you mean by "well"
and what you mean by "our economic system."
Does a Scandanavian-style mixed economy count?
How about a State authoritarian Singapore style
model? And not that I am prepared to defend it,
but there are plenty of people on the left who
think that State socialism is the way to go.
Many, many (probably most people worldwide) are
more interested in creating a base level of
prosperity for everyone, not just a mass of
phenomenal wealth for the top 1%. The US model
is not widely emulated for a reason.
\_ *Every* country has a top 1% with phenomal
wealth. Good luck changing that. It would
be a first in world history if it happened.
\_ Uh, Cuba?
\_ Looked at relatively, especially Cuba.
\_ Any evidence for this statement?
Everyone I know who has been to
Cuba says otherwise, but maybe you
have some hard facts to back up
your opinion.
\_ Oddly enough, I don't have
Fidel's tax returns in front of
me. Why don't you go ahead and
tell us what "everyone [you]
know who has been to Cuba says"?
\_ They say that the standard
of living is very flat and
that no one lives
ostentatiously. They also say
that the hospitals are
missing every other light bulb
to save electricity.
\_ Did they travel in the
same circles as Castro and
that tier? I'll grant you
that it's flat for most,
but if Fidel needs the
latest/greatest tech for
his health, the slope is
steep.
\_ Do you think the distribution of wealth
is the same world-wide? Look at this
graphical representation:
http://www.lcurve.org
In the US, the top 0.1% makes 8% of the
overall income, in Sweden it is 1%. So
I guess it depends on what you mean by
"phenomenal". 10X average is a lot, but
much less phenomenal than 80X, right?
\_ 10X is phenomenal. 80X is too and
doesn't make 10X any less so. Would
you think 10X your salary was
phenomenal or just 'a lot' because
it wasn't 80X?
\_ I think 10X average salary is merely
"a lot." At this point it is merely
semantics.
\_ So if you got 10X your current
you wouldn't think that was
phenomenal? Okey dokey. Not
much to be said to that when 10X
is the difference between doing
well enough and being able to
retire early doing whatever you
want with your life while
you're still young enough to
do it after only a few years of
10X.
\_ I am already making 5X median
income, so no, doubling my
salary wouldn't really change
my life that much. You aren't
paying much attention to the
words you are using. And no,
even if my salary doubled, I
wouldn't be able to retire
soon.
\_ Is your law professor a "leftist"?
\- i think you also have to consider the thesis "there are things
that matter to people other than job prospects" ... having your
"homeland" under somebody elsese rule seems to be a good way to
get people upset, for example. i am not too familar with what's
under the hood of japanese suicider bombers [how willing they
were etc], but at least it cant be glibly chalked up to
religion, let alone islam. i dunno the socioeconomic status of
the IRA, but they clearly werent desperately poor [not suicide
bombers, but terrorists and willing to die (see eg BOBBY SANDS,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Irish_Hunger_Strike I dont
think all the TAMIL TIGER suicide bombers are in desperate
straits financially. So consider looking at the "dual"
... rather than focusing on what one person being a suicide
bomber says about him, what does a steady availability of them
say about how fucked up things must be. I think usually there
are better structural explanations for many things than the
vague cultural ones [like the talk in the 8-s about "asian
capitalism" ... hey guess what, the japanese economy looks
different from the US one probably more because of corporate
structure laws and finance laws, not these vague "harmony and
patience" arguments ... the german economy also looks
different, in part because they have firm level unions.
finally, the islamic suicide bombers phenomena may just be
testimony to a sosophisticated and expert system of brainwashing,
like JIM JONES, DKORESH etc. Anyway, the most on point suggestion
I have is YMWTGF(alan krueger terrorism). i am not saying
islam nor general life conditions play no role, but it is
more complicated than that.
bomber says about him, what does a steady availability (and
climbing income of the candidates) of them say about how fucked
up things must be. I think usually there are better structural
explanations for many things than the vague cultural ones [like
the talk in the 80s about "asian capitalism" ... hey guess
what, the japanese economy looks different from the US one
probably more because of corporate structure laws and finance
laws, not these vague "harmony and patience" arguments ... the
german economy also looks different, in part because they have
firm level unions. finally, the islamic suicide bombers
phenomena may just be testimony to a sophisticated and expert
system of brainwashing, like JIM JONES, DKORESH etc. Anyway,
the most on point suggestion I have is YMWTGF(ALAN KRUEGER
terrorism). i am not saying islam nor general life conditions
play no role, but it is more complicated than that.
\- http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.htm --psb
\_ So George Bush is a leftist now. This explains much.
\_ This has been in doubt for some time: http://csua.org/u/j2r
(Boston Globe article on book by Robert A. Pape). However, it's
common sense that Muslim Fundamentalist groups are attractive to
the disenfranchised, particularly in our ally countries (like
Egypt and Saudi Arabia) where odds of bettering your situation
through the status quo are vanishingly slim. Cf. Islamic Rev. in
Iran.
\_ And because SA and E are dictatorships it is a good idea to
bomb Americans and Europeans? I'm not following this line of
thought.
\_ Sorry, no, not my point. My point is that we still need to
promote good economics and democratic politics in these
countries if we don't want them to get taken over by religious
fanatics.
\_ Anyone who seriously makes this claim (about Islamic radicals)
hasn't spent much time studying or thinking about it. The leadership
of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and
the Wahhabiists in Saudi Arabia are all educated, mostly middle
class men. Now it might be true that they find themselves
marginalized and with little opportunity to change their lot, but
they are certainly not starving and not even poor, by their
countries standards. Palestine is kind of a different story,
but don't you think that not having jobs, having your freedom
of movement and your right of statehood taken away might tend
to breed resentment?
\_ No one has a 'right of statehood'. Nations have always come and
gone based on the (mis)fortunes of war, disease, natural
disasters, etc.
\_ Your opinion is in disagreement with the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and the UN, but I guess you are entitled to
it. Who else in the world does not have citizenship rights?
People don't neccesarily have the right to the state that
they want, but everyone has the right to citizenship.
\_ That's a 'right' on paper. It is not a natural right. And
it is not my opinion that countries come and go, it is
historical fact. Maybe you meant something else.
\_ The right to citizenship comes and goes? I don't think
so, but I guess if you want to bring back slavery, you
are welcome to it.
\_ No. The existence of nations/states. And no, most
conquered people were not historically made citizens
of the conquering state. When the Maya fell apart
due to disease or whatever it was, there was no
replacement state. If you lived behind the Iron
Curtain I guess you were a citizen of something but
that didn't come with any rights. If you were born
in this country not that long ago as an Eskimo or
continental Native America, then no you weren't a
citizen. And no, slavery is not the only alternative
to citizenship as I just demonstrated.
\_ Stating it like that reminds me of the old historical cycle,
middle class wants to be upper class so convinces lower class to
fight for them. Sometimes the middle class succeeds and trades
places with the upper class, but the lower class stays at the
bottom.
\_ More like lowest classes rebel after being starved out, make
some idiot king and things are better for a short time until
they have to do it all over again. Elected systems of
government implicitly acknowledge this cycle by giving the
people a non-bloody way to turn over the government every
so often. That's why you'll *never* see a revolution in this
country or any other elective government system.
\_ Well, yes, elections _and_ a degree of complacency brought
about by a pretty good standard of living even for the
poor. The Upper Class would do well to remember that the
distance between Harlem and the Upper East Side is really
negligible-- and the distance between Compton and Beverly
Hills even more so.
\- See "great wall of grosse pointe" aka alter rd. |
| 5/23 |
|
| www.lcurve.org -> www.lcurve.org/ Think of the L-Curve when you read your daily news I hope you do READ your daily news rather than rely on the TV infotainment that masquerades as news. What are its implications for tax structures, campaign finance reform, the policies of the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank, abandonment of inner cities, factory closings, sweatshop labor, guest worker programs, US foreign policy, why we go to war, etc. Should the goal be to get motivated and get yourself onto the vertical spike? Some people who have responded to this site see it this way, but I think that misses the point. I saw a bumper sticker recently that says it best for me: Our economy produces tremendous wealth but it also produces tremendous poverty. Sure, some people can be lazy, but when large numbers of hard working people live in poverty and the middle class is shrinking, it is a systemic , not an individual problem. It goes to the top, and leaves the masses to fight over the crumbs. True, it has been this way through the ages, but that doesnt mean we should be satisfied with such a system. Some doctors and lawyers and professional people, with incomes of a few hundred thousand dollars may feel rich. They may have nicer homes and cars, and they may have attitudes that separate them from the masses. But they still must work for a living and are primarily consumers of their earnings. Whether they recognize it or not, they actually have more in common with the people at the bottom than they do with the people in the top 1/2. Can democracy meaningfully exist where the distribution of wealth, and thus the distribution of power, is this concentrated? We recently went through an economic boom where people on the horizontal spike showed little if any improvement in their condition while those in the vertical spike showed huge gains. Do we really want to gear up our national policies to repeat this performance? Those in the vertical spike would like to have you resent the poor who are portrayed as welfare leeches. Which group actually has a bigger negative impact on your lifestyle: the people in the bottom half of the graph, or the people in the vertical spike? In 1997 over 144,000 tax returns were filed with adjusted gross incomes of $1 million or more. As the vertical spike rises it thins down to a few individuals, but there is a growing class of billionaires that collectively holds a substantial fraction of the wealth of the country. People on the vertical spike can use their influence single-mindedly and very effectively. A single billionaire can get the undivided attention of any politician he wants, any time he wants. If he doesnt get what he wants he can, in fact , fight city hall, the statehouse, and even the federal government. People on the horizontal spike must pool their limited individual power and organize to have any effect at all. The mainstream media has been bought up by people in the vertical spike. The primary channels for information and expressed opinion are controlled and filtered by a small, powerful group on the vertical spike whose interests are not representative of the majority of Americans. Even when there is no direct political message the programming is tailored to the perspectives and sensitivities of large corporations. Programming is simply the hook to hold an audience until the next commercial. Serious examination of ideas of any kind is seen as counterproductive because it may alienate or bore part of the potential audience. The growing media monopoly dilutes and distorts the national dialog, and thereby destroys the basis for democracy. We must find ways to rebuild community and learn to talk to each other directly . When taxes are cut, whose taxes are cut and whose programs are cut? What kinds of taxes are being cut and what kinds of taxes whether they are called taxes or not are being imposed? The pre-Reagan progressive income tax drew more from the vertical spike. Simplification is unrelated to the issue of who the money is coming from. You could have a simple progressive tax just as easily as a simple flat tax. The proposal to eliminate the income tax entirely would be disastrous. Those on the vertical spike would escape virtually all of their obligations and the burden of government would be born almost entirely by those of us on the horizontal spike, both through increases in other forms of taxation and reduction of services. This is the direction tax reform needs to take if it is to be truly considered reform. Can the people on the horizontal spike take control of their own destinies and truly make this a nation governed in the best interests of the people? The economy is a complex system, but it is essentially a human invention. If it is not managed intentionally, then it is managed or manipulated by those who hold political and economic power, typically to their own advantage. It is just as important to ask how the benefits of the economy are distributed through the population . A truly democratic society needs to find ways to manage the economy to benefit the population as a whole. Links to Related Sites Data sources: Census Bureau / Internal Revenue Service / Economic Policy Institute Note: these data sources are notably lacking in data within the top 1. Census data goes up to $300,000 and IRS data goes up to $1 million. Information to plot the vertical spike had to be obtained from news articles and other sources of commentary. If information on the top 1 is not known or easily obtained, statements about the socioeconomics of income and wealth are suspect. Michael Parenti has written an illuminating article on this topic. Since I first posted this site, several people have quibbled over various technical points. Here are a few of the issues raised: Increase in net worth is not the same thing as income, according to one reader. However, I recently received a comment from economist John Maher who wrote, I believe the first readers comment is incorrect. Increase in net worth IS income according to the renowned economist, John R. The income of very wealthy people typically varies radically from one year to the next. Sometimes years of huge earnings are followed by years with similarly huge losses. I have added a comment to this effect in the main body of the text above. Those of us on the horizontal spike, however, find radical jumps in income much harder to achieve. The published wealth of billionaires is typically estimated by their holdings in their own companies. These estimates do not included their typically vast diversified investments. Income on paper, from growth of investments, needs to be distinguished from taxable income. Its true that there are differences among different kinds of income, so they arent strictly comparable, but political and economic power derives from wealth, whether it is taxable or not. My response to all of these kinds of questions, in short, is that the truth of my central thesis is not dependent on the exact height of the graph or shadings of definitions. As one correspondent put it, there is a money spike and there is a population spike . One class derives concentrated power from its concentrated wealth. That power is effective only to the extent that it can be mobilized through organization. |
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Irish_Hunger_Strike In 1976, as part of the policy of "criminalisation", the British Government brought an end to Special Category Status for paramilitary prisoners in Northern Ireland. These protests aimed to re-establish their political status by securing what were known as the "Five Demands": 1 The right not to wear a prison uniform; Mairad Farrell, and then a short-lived hunger strike by several dozen more prisoners in HM Prison Maze. In a war of nerves between the IRA leadership and the British government, with McKenna lapsing in and out of a coma and on the brink of death, the government appeared to concede the essence of the prisoners' five demands with a thirty page document detailing a proposed settlement. In January 1981 it became clear that the prisoners' demands had not in fact been conceded. Prison authorities began to supply the prisoners with official issue civilian clothing, whereas the prisoners demanded the right to wear their own clothing. Sands' election victory raised hopes that a settlement could be negotiated, however Margaret Thatcher stood firm refusing to give concessions to the hunger strikers stating "We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. edit Other participants in the hunger strike Although ten men died during the course of the hunger strike, thirteen other men began refusing food but were taken off hunger strike, either due to medical reasons or after intervention by their families deciding that their relative's death would be futile. In 2005, the role of Gerry Adams was questioned by former prisoner Richard O'Rawe, who was the public relations officer inside the prison during the strike. |
| chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.htm Seeking the Roots of Terrorism By ALAN B KRUEGER and JITKA MALECKOV In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a consensus quickly emerged that poverty and lack of education were major causes of terrorist acts and su pport for terrorism. Subscribing to that theory are politicians, journal ists, and many scholars, as well as officials responsible for administer ing aid to poor countries. For example, James D Wolfensohn, president o f the World Bank, asserted that the war on terrorism "will not be won un til we have come to grips with the problem of poverty and thus the sourc es of discontent." "We fight against poverty," George W Bush s aid in a speech in Monterrey, Mexico, "because hope is an answer to terr or. We will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of educa tion and failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrori sts can seize." At the other end of the political spectrum, Al Gore, at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that the anger that underlies t errorism in the Islamic world stems from "the continued failure to thriv e, as rates of economic growth stagnate, while the cohort of unemployed young men under 20 continues to increase." For example, Elie Wi esel claimed, "Education is the way to eliminate terrorism." And the Nob el laureate Kim Dae Jung asserted, "At the bottom of terrorism is povert y" With such a strong and broad coalition in agreement, we asked, what evide nce links poverty and poor education to terrorism? Perhaps surprisingly, the relevant literature and the new evidence that we assembled challeng e the consensus. In a study we recently circulated as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, we considered support for, and parti cipation in, terrorism at both individual and national levels. Although the available data at the national level are weaker, both types of evide nce point in the same direction and lead us to conclude that any connect ion between poverty, education, and terrorism is, at best, indirect, com plicated, and probably quite weak. Some definitions, like the State Departm ent's, emphasize the "subnational," "clandestine" character of "politica lly motivated violence," while others include the state as a perpetrator . We have focused on substate terrorism because we believe that the root s of state-sponsored terrorism are substantially different. What's commo n to most definitions is the inclusion of terrorists' goal of inducing f ear in a target audience that transcends the physical harm caused to imm ediate victims, the ultimate purpose being persuasion. A large body of evidence exists on hate crimes, a close cousin to terrori sm. These are crimes against members of a religious, racial, or ethnic g roup selected solely because they are part of that group. Hate crimes ar e usually less orchestrated than terrorist acts, and thus a cleaner meas ure of the "pure supply" of those willing to carry out hateful acts. The effect of both terrorism and hate crimes is to wreak terror in a greate r number of people than those directly affected by the violence. Until r ecently, social scientists thought that economic deprivation was a cruci al determinant of hate crimes. However, after research by Donald P Gree n and his collaborators at Yale, a consensus is emerging in the social-s cience literature that the incidence of hate crimes, such as lynchings o f African-American people in the South, or violence against gay and lesb ian people in New York, bears little relation to economic conditions. About 10 percent of the 3,100 counties in the United States are currently home to a hate group such as the Ku Klux Klan, according to the Souther n Poverty Law Center. A study by the Swarthmore economists Philip N Jef ferson and Frederic L Pryor found that the likelihood that a hate group was located in a county was unrelated to the unemployment rate in the c ounty, and positively related to the education level in the county (that is, the higher the education level in the county, the greater the likel ihood of a hate group). Similarly, a study by one of us (Krueger) and J rn-Steffen Pischke, now of the London School of Economics and Political Science, found that in Germany, both the average education level and ave rage wage in the country's 543 counties were unrelated to the incidence of violence against foreigners occurring there. Neither cyclical downturns nor longer-term regional disparities in living standards appear to be correlated with the incidence of a wide range of hate crimes. That doesn't prove the absence of a causal relationship, o f course; but if there were a direct causal effect one would expect hate crimes to rise during periods of economic hardship. Rather than economi c conditions, the hate-crimes literature suggests that a breakdown in la w enforcement, and sanctioning and encouragement of civil disobedience, are significant causes. Turning to terrorism, public opinion polls can provide information on whi ch segments of the population support terrorist or militant activities. In December 2001, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, conducted a public-opinion poll of 1 ,357 Palestinians age 18 or older in the West Bank and Gaza on topics in cluding the September 11 attacks in the United States, support for an Is raeli-Palestinian peace agreement, and attacks against Israel. First, support for attacks against Israe li targets by the Palestinian population is widespread (from 74 percent to 90 percent, depending on the subgroup), though it is important to emp hasize that there is a distinction between support for attacks expressed in a poll at a particular moment and participation or active collusion in such attacks. Second, a majority, more than 60 percent of the populat ion surveyed, believes that attacks against Israeli civilians have helpe d to achieve Palestinian rights in a way that negotiations could not hav e These results offer no evidence that educated people are less supportive of attacks against Israeli targets. In fact, the support for attacks aga inst Israeli targets is higher among those with more than a secondary-sc hool education than among those with only an elementary-school education , and the support is considerably lower among those who are illiterate. The study showed also that support for attacks against Israeli targets is particularly strong among students, merchants, and professionals. Notab ly, the unemployed are somewhat less likely to support such attacks. If poverty were indeed the wellspring of support for terrorism or political ly motivated violence, one would have expected the unemployed to be more supportive of attacks than were merchants and professionals, but the ev idence points the other way. News reports often create the impression that Islam is a source of terror ism. Note, though, that suicide attacks are a relatively new, alien elem ent in the history of mainstream Islam. The Koran rejects suicide, and c lassical Islamic legal texts consider it a serious sin. True, a fighter who dies for faith or another noble cause is held in great esteem in bot h legal and cultural tradition, and those who die on the path of God are promised immediate recompense. Individuals or Islamic sects have used p olitical assassinations (including an 11th-century Shiite sect in Northe rn Iran, the corrupted nickname of which is the origin of the term "assa ssin"). Those fighters, however, did not commit suicide attacks. Also, s uicide attacks and other forms of terrorism have been carried out by peo ple belonging to other established religions, too, and by individuals pr ofessing no religious faith at all. Timothy McVeigh's heinous terrorist attack on American soil, for instance, cannot be linked to organized rel igion. To study the correlates of involvement in a terrorist organization more d irectly, we performed a detailed analysis of participation in Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah is a multifaceted organization that provides healt h and educational services, has a political wing, and is also believed t o engage in terrorism. The US State Department and British Home Office have both class... |
| csua.org/u/j2r -> www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/07/03/why_do_suicide_bombers_do_it/ The Boston Globe CRITICAL FACULTIES Why do suicide bombers do it? By Christopher Shea | July 3, 2005 Four years ago, the late Susan Sontag was excoriated for arguing, in a brief New Yorker piece, that the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center were inspired not by hatred of ''civilization" or ''the free world" but rather by opposition to ''specific American alliances and actions." Today that argument--seen by hawks in those dark post-Sept. No one, for example, is hurling charges of crypto-treason at Robert A Pape, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago known for hard-nosed studies of air power in wartime. But Pape's new book, ''Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" (Random House), which grew out of a much-cited 2003 article in the American Political Science Review, is prime example of the mainstreaming of Sontag's once-taboo view. Of the 384 attackers for whom Pape has data, who committed their deeds in such danger zones as Sri Lanka (where the decidedly non-fundamentalist, quasi-Marxist Tamil Tigers have used suicide attacks since 1987 in their fight for a Tamil homeland), Israel, Chechnya, Iraq, and New York, only 43 percent came from religiously affiliated groups. Strikingly, during the Lebanese civil war, he says, some 70 percent of suicide attackers were Christians (though members of secular groups). The thrust of his argument is that suicide terrorism is an eminently rational strategy. Everywhere it has been used, the countries that face it make concessions: The United States left Lebanon; Israel withdrew from Lebanon and now (much of) the West Bank; Since occupation spurs terrorism, Pape concludes that America should ''expeditiously" (but not recklessly) withdraw troops from Iraq. It should also reduce its energy dependence on the Middle East, refrain from posting troops in the Gulf States, and return to a strategy of balancing the Middle Eastern countries against one another from afar--policy prescriptions that have inspired criticism apart from his social science. If suicide attacks were a universally rational weapon of the weak, the critics argued, we would see them everywhere--and we don't. In fact, in a fascinating contribution to the new essay collection ''Making Sense of Suicide Missions" (Oxford), the Yale political scientist Stathis Kalyvas and a Spanish colleague, Ignacio Sanchez Cuenca, point out that FARC, the Columbian rebel group, once hatched a plan to fly a plane into that country's presidential palace but could find no willing pilot, even after dangling an offer of $2 million for the pilot's family. In addition, the Basque group ETA has rejected offers from its members to blow themselves up for the cause. But in the book, Pape reconsiders those cultural factors: Suicide bombing, he now writes, is most likely to happen when the occupying force and the ''occupied" insurgents are from different religious backgrounds. David Laitin, a Stanford University expert on civil wars, and Eli Berman, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, have demonstrated that while only 18 percent of the 114 civil wars since 1945 have pitted members of one religious group against another, fully 90 percent of suicide attacks take place in inter-religious conflicts. Laitin and Berman, too, view suicide terrorism as following impeccable game-theory logic: When your targets are ''hard" and the enemy is wealthy, well armed, and possessed of good intelligence, they write, suicide bombing begins to make sense as a strategy. However, Diego Gambetta, an Oxford University sociologist and the editor of ''Making Sense of Suicide Missions," thinks these claims of rationality among self-immolators go a bit too far. Israel had already committed to pulling out of the West Bank under the Oslo accords when a fresh wave of attacks came in 1994 and 1995. Far from causing the withdrawal, he argues, the attacks may in fact have heightened Israeli resistance to it. There may be non-Islamic suicide bombers, Gambetta writes. But ''we do not have even a single case of a non-Islamic faith justifying" suicide missions. Gambetta makes a tentative cultural-historical argument, tracing the suicidal impulse in the Middle East back to the Iran-Iraq war, when thousands of fundamentalist Iranian soldiers marched into certain death against Iraqi tank formations. That strain of self-sacrifice then spread into Lebanon and Palestine and now Iraq, through a badly understood dynamic. Conflicting theories aside, social scientists have made strides in understanding suicide bombers. Once considered the dregs of the earth (poor, uneducated, sexually starved), they have been shown--by Claude Berrebi, of the RAND Institute, among others--to be, on average, better educated and better off than their countrymen. Nevertheless, all the work on suicide terrorism has one major, merciful shortcoming: sample size. Hard as it is to believe amid the grim daily dispatches from Iraq, suicide bombing remains, among the infinite numbers of ways humans cause bloodshed, exceedingly rare. Christopher Shea's Critical Faculties column appears in Ideas biweekly. |