Robert Fisk: The cult of the suicide bomber

[tpsbmam]

Source: Independent UK

But a month-long investigation by The Independent, culling four Arabic-language newspapers, official Iraqi statistics, two Beirut news agencies and Western reports, shows that an incredible 1,121 Muslim suicide bombers have blown themselves up in Iraq. This is a very conservative figure and – given the propensity of the authorities (and of journalists) to report only those suicide bombings that kill dozens of people – the true estimate may be double this number. On several days, six – even nine – suicide bombers have exploded themselves in Iraq in a display of almost Wal-Mart availability. If life in Iraq is cheap, death is cheaper.

This is perhaps the most frightening and ghoulish legacy of George Bush's invasion of Iraq five years ago. Suicide bombers in Iraq have killed at least 13,000 men, women and children – our most conservative estimate gives a total figure of 13,132 – and wounded a minimum of 16,112 people. If we include the dead and wounded in the mass stampede at the Baghdad Tigris river bridge in the summer of 2005 – caused by fear of suicide bombers – the figures rise to 14,132 and 16,612 respectively. Again, it must be emphasised that these statistics are minimums. For 529 of the suicide bombings in Iraq, no figures for wounded are available. Where wounded have been listed in news reports as "several", we have made no addition to the figures. And the number of critically injured who later died remains unknown. Set against a possible death toll of half a million Iraqis since the March 2003 invasion, the suicide bombers' victims may appear insignificant; but the killers' ability to terrorise civilians, militiamen and Western troops and mercenaries is incalculable.

Never before has the Arab world witnessed a phenomenon of suicide-death on this scale. During Israel's occupation of Lebanon after 1982, one Hizbollah suicide-bombing a month was considered remarkable. During the Palestinian intifadas of the 1980s and 1990s, four per month was regarded as unprecedented. But suicide bombers in Iraq have been attacking at the average rate of two every three days since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion.

And, although neither the Iraqi government nor their American mentors will admit this, scarcely 10 out of more than a thousand suicide killers have been identified. We know from their families that Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians and Algerians have been among the bombers. In a few cases, we have names. But in most attacks, the authorities in Iraq – if they can still be called "authorities" after five years of catastrophe – have no idea to whom the bloodied limbs and headless torsos of the bombers belong.

Even more profoundly disturbing is that the "cult" of the suicide bomber has seeped across national frontiers. Within a year of the Iraqi invasion, Afghan Taliban bombers were blowing themselves up alongside Western troops or bases in Helmand province and in the capital Kabul. The practice leached into Pakistan, striking down thousands of troops and civilians, killing even the principal opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto. The London Tube and bus bombings – despite the denials of Tony Blair – were obviously deeply influenced by events in Iraq.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/robert-fisk-the-cult-of-the-suicide-bomber-795649.html

[Javaman]

1. It's odd, they have a high recruitment levels but they keep losing members. nt

[Peace Patriot]

2. Five suicide bombers a week in Iraq! My God, what a statistic!

It makes some sense that, when people have no hope, when oppressors have demonstrated, time and again, that peoples' lives have no value, when people are caged and tortured, or see others caged and tortured and blown to bits, and people are deprived of everything, all decency--food, homes, medical care, civil order, stability, clean water, trade--and when peoples' own societies become oppressive and dysfunctional, due to constant aggression and plotting against them, by people who want their oil, or war profits, or slave labor--and when this has gone on for decades, and can be traced back to the 1950s, when the west, in its greed for oil, destroyed all efforts at good self-government in the Middle East--and, as in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia--installed brutal dictators--that some people simply go crazy, and become vulnerable to suggestions that suicide is the best course, and why not take out some of the oppressors at the same time, and win bonuses in Heaven?

The early Christian martyrs who sought martyrdom--as the Roman Empire crumbled around them, and injustice and civil disorder prevailed--were similar to these suicide bombers. Oppression breeds self-loathing. Religious fanaticism and the power-mad feed on the self-loathing of others. But the Christian martyrs didn't take others with them (except perhaps by convincing the reluctant to become martyrs). That is the snag in understanding this phenomenon: the mass scale of suicide while taking others with you.

It is difficult to understand how this mental state has gotten a grip on so many people--five per week over five years in Iraq--the notion that there is nothing left to live for except killing yourself and other people who have done nothing directly to harm you--except in the midst of a hot war. Soldiers suffer it, I'm sure. We have historical accounts of it. But civilians? We really do need to understand it, and I think Fisk is right to extrapolate back to causes. People don't normally act this way. They are normally life-loving, resilient, adaptable, even when they've suffered great hardship. The human psyche seems made to order for this, in fact. It puts a protective net around itself during--or after--great sufferings, and can manufacture hope out of the nothing.

Why have people in this circumstance--the Iraq War--and not just Iraqis, but others who are in sympathy with them--become suicide bombers in such numbers? What is at work there, that is nowhere else at work--neither in current Palestine, nor anywhere else in history? The Vietcong didn't do this. The leftist guerrillas in Latin America never did this. The American revolutionaries didn't do it; nor the French peasants, who had more cause. Nor the Russians, nor the Chinese, in their revolutions. Even the Christian martyrs didn't take up martyrdom to such a degree, although I'm not sure of the numbers (and, as I said, they didn't take innocent victims with them).

Mass self-killings by blowing up others. Aside from suicidal behavior in a hot war, it seems unique to our era, unique to the Middle East, and--as Fisk shows--heavily concentrated in Iraq, and also unique to Islam. There were Buddhist monks who immolated themselves during the U.S. war on Vietnam, but it was a rare event (and again, they didn't kill others). There have been martyrs and martyrs-who-take-others-with-them in many wars, and in many kinds of conflict, but never this many, never such a concentrated effort of what may be called collective consciousness, a movement, many people having the same idea: killing themselves and blowing up others. Think of the collective despair and collective madness that it represents.

I don't mean to downplay the Bush Junta's responsibility for brutalizing people to such a degree that this phenomenon could occur. I think they are guilty of doing that. Their contempt for human life is monstrous. Nor do I want to downplay the role of the mullahs or other powermongers who would use peoples' despair and self-loathing to create such a weapon. The instigators and organizers are also guilty. But when I consider humanity as a whole, and the earth as a whole, and the suicidal path that the human race is on, with regard to the earth, I wonder if these suicide bombers are not, also, our "canaries in the coal mine"--that is, due to their particular personal and social vulnerabilities, they are demonstrating something that we all feel, deep down: despair of the future.

There are too many people. There is too much pollution. There are too many consumers, whom greedbag corporate executives, and fascist moguls, are only too happy to cut down forests for, and start oil wars for. We are acting like crowded rats in a cage, fighting over poisoned food--fighting over a resource, oil, that is killing the planet.

The Middle East--and Iraq in particular--was the "cradle" of our "civilization." But it has been lived in too long, and has suffered too many deforestations and other prices of human culture, and is now too hot, too dry, and too infertile to support sustainable future development for large numbers of people. It is a very stressed environment. And its main resource is oil, which has created artificial wealth with (in general) little or no planning for anything else, by those who control the wealth. Saddam's government actually created a good educational system in Iraq--the best in the Middle East--and that is now gone. Iran is perhaps doing the best by its people, with the oil wealth--and, of course, that is the place that the Bushites want to destroy next--if not Venezuela, which is visionary as to use of its oil profits, compared to Middle Eastern countries, not to mention democratic.

In any case, this highly stressed environment, Iraq/the Middle East, its land and its people ravaged by war and associated horrors, inflicted by the Bush Junta, may be producing numerous suicide bombers both as an expression of individual and social despair, and also as an expression of humanity in general, you and me, and all others, in despair at the imminent death of our Mother, Planet Earth, and our inability to stop killing her. The environmental crisis that we face is actually far, far worse than the Iraq War or the pending Great Depression II. We are massively destroying the life system of Earth--with thousands of species going extinct every day, with bee die-offs, frog die-offs, bird die-offs and ocean die-offs portending massive disruption of the food chain, and global warming disruptions of surviving species and natural ecosystems everywhere you look. A planetary ecosystem in its death throes. The very environment in which we evolved, and upon which we are utterly dependent, is being destroyed...by us. By our pollutants. By our deforestation. By our economic arrangements. By oil.

And what are we killing people in Iraq for? Oil. And what do Iraqi and other suicide bombers know about oil? That it is all they have. Oil and the desert. Humanity's future? One big desert, with no sign of human life? Can that be the nightmare that suicide bombers are suffering, perhaps well beneath the surface of consciousness? A collective nightmare of humanity's demise? They feel it. They project it. They DO it. They act it out. Nothing to do with religion, really, nor even with the warmongers and powermongers who may be the immediate cause. But deeper. Some deep flaw or failure in the human psyche--or in our ability to adapt (for instance, to change our economic organization, and get control of the out-of-control global corporate predators who are driving global warming)--that the wounded psyches in the Middle East, who end up as suicide bombers, feel more directly than the rest of us.

IF we had been able to prevent the Iraq War, and IF we were helping people, instead of torturing and killing them, we could perhaps have done some "conscious dreaming" and directed this death energy, this killing of our own Mother, into positive goals, calling upon our awesome adaptability and creativity to restore, or at least stabilize, the web of life that we are tearing asunder. And, in that case, there would be no--or far fewer--suicide bombers in the Middle East. The phenomenon would shrink down to the individual level--one person's, or a few peoples', despair--as with other kinds of suicide and murder. A pity. A tragedy. Something we want to prevent. But not a collective act, representing a collective reality that we refuse to face.

I posit this as a theory. It grew out of a notion of mine that the super-rich have gone insane, and are madly hoarding wealth, as an insane response to very deeply felt peril--fundamental peril, the end of the Earth--which we all feel, but which they are particularly unable to respond to, with creativity, and with faith in collective human action. They want THEIRS. They always have. That is their habit of mind--egocentric greed. And this peril we are all facing just makes them worse--intensifies their acquisitiveness, even as their greed intensifies the problem, and makes it harder and harder to solve. The rich are killing our planet, our only home, and we seem helplessly caught in their crazy nightmare, with no exit door. How do you stop them if they now own and control all the voting machines, here, and all news and opinion (or almost all) everywhere? How do you stop them when they own everything--all the land, all the resources--as well as the government? How do you stop their mad, frenzied panic of greed and destruction?

Are these numerous suicide bombers also an expression of a similar kind of panic--a collective panic at the nightmare we find ourselves in, with no way out? The end of our civilization, which began in Iraq? The end of all human civilization? The end of all life on earth?

The suicide bombers, then, are similar to the panicked rich--they think it all begins and ends with them, but, more fundamentally, they don't know why they are self-destructive and murderous. It is too deep for them. They just express this fatalistic view--the rich by hoarding, and the poor, invaded Iraqis and other Middle Easterners, by blowing themselves up, and--in their minds, I think--everybody else with them. Making it all disappear, in an act that describes--and creates--their nightmare landscape. And ours?