RE: [Marxism] Source of Suicide Terrorism (edited)

["Austin, Andrew" <austina@xxxxxxxx>]

Pape cautions the reader not to overemphasize the influence of religion.  
Rather, suicide terrorism is more of a strategy designed to force the West to 
withdraw its military from the Middle East and Central Asia.  As long as the US 
and its allies maintain a military presence in the region, suicide terrorism 
will continue.  He therefore recommends that the US and its allies establish 
bases outside the region, maintain readiness, and focus on strengthening 
homeland security. 
 
Mahmood Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots 
of Terror) made this argument more explicitly in a discussion with Bill Moyers 
back in April 2004.  The United States is the destabilizing force in the 
region, he said.  The conventional wisdom that "if we leave, Iraq will fall 
apart, therefore we must stay and finish the job" fails to appreciate the 
reality that Iraq is falling apart because we are there inciting violence. 
 
This is me talking: US policy in the Middle East and Central Asia is a 
disaster.  It creates and perpetuates what it is (at least formally and 
certainly ironically) meant to suppress: politics by violent means.  It's 
almost as if Bush and Blair are pursuing a policy designed to heighten violence 
so that they can use the resulting instability to justify greater intervention. 
 Such a suggestion may strike some as conspiratorial, but Blair's speeches in 
the wake of the London attacks make the most sense operating from this 
assumption.  It's hard to imagine a team of intelligent politicians and 
policymakers (Bush excepted) designing a policy this awful without some hidden 
agenda. 
 
Conservatives, such as Fox's Bill O'Reilly, who interviewed Pape yesterday, are 
arguing that pulling out of the region would signal to the terrorists that 
their tactics work, that they have defeated us, and that for this reason we 
must stay.  However, it seems to me terribly stubborn to pursue an ineffective 
and probably ultimately a self-destructive policy because we don't want 
terrorists thinking they've won.  If leaving the region will bring peace and 
stability, and if peace and stability are truly our objectives, then we should 
leave.  It really may be this simple.
 
I could say more about this.  For instance, beneath the terrorism is a 
long-range plan developed by Rumsfeld and Cheney in the Ford administration to 
occupy the region to (1) entrench US hegemony globally and (2) control the 
world's oil and gas supplies.  In other words, the formal goals of the 
administration - all that flowery stuff about liberal values and establishing 
democracy - are deceptions facilitating the expansion of American Empire.  But 
I overslept and I need to mow the lawn. So perhaps more later.
 
Andrew

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