[Mb-civic] The Puzzle Of the Suicide Bomber - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Puzzle Of the Suicide Bomber

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, November 16, 2005; Page A19

For a woman who recently escaped death, Sajida Rishawi seemed oddly calm 
during her appearance this week on Jordanian television. Wearing a white 
headscarf, speaking in a monotone and explaining that "my husband is the 
one who organized everything, I don't know anything else," she described 
how she and her husband, an Iraqi linked to the insurgent Abu Musab 
Zarqawi, had crossed the border of Iraq into Jordan, made their way to 
Amman, and prepared carefully: "He had two explosive belts. He made me 
wear one and he wore the other and taught me how to use it, how to pull 
and control it."

 From there, the couple took a taxi to a hotel where "there was a 
wedding and there were women and children." Her husband stood in one 
corner, Rishawi stood in another. Her husband pulled his cord. "I tried 
to detonate and it failed. People fled running and I left running with 
them." Thirty-eight people died in that blast, mostly Jordanians and 
Palestinians.

Thanks to the modern miracle of online video links, it is possible to 
watch Rishawi make that confession, over and over again. You can observe 
her turning around slowly, showing off her suicide belt. You can listen 
for a hint of vocal inflection or look for a note of emotion in her 
face. What you cannot do is learn why she did it.

But perhaps that's not surprising. In the four years since the most 
famous suicide bombing in history, our explanations of what motivates 
suicide bombers haven't grown any simpler. Certainly the old stereotype 
of a suicide bomber as someone ill-educated or illiterate was shattered 
by the life story of Mohamed Atta, leader of the Sept. 11 plot, who 
defended a master's thesis in urban planning at his Hamburg university 
and who spoke German so well that he liked to correct the grammatical 
mistakes of native speakers. The notion that all suicide bombers are 
victims of poverty has been overturned too: One of the London bus 
bombers drove a Mercedes.

Even the cartoon image of the religious fanatic, the crazed young man 
convinced that he will be welcomed in heaven by a bevy of beautiful 
virgins, has fallen by the wayside. Rishawi is not the first woman to 
attempt to blow herself up: Ayat Akhras, an 18-year-old Palestinian 
girl, detonated an explosive belt at the entrance to a Jerusalem 
supermarket in 2002. Akhras was not only young and female, she also was 
relatively secular, on good terms with her family and engaged to be married.

Nor does "trauma" provide a satisfying explanation. According to her 
relatives, Rishawi was motivated by the deaths of her brothers in Iraq. 
But thousands of other Iraqi women also have brothers and husbands who 
have died in the fighting, and they would nevertheless be horrified by 
the thought of murdering a group of strangers. Ordinary psychological 
explanations are useful, but they aren't sufficient.

Most broader studies of suicide bombers have come to the same baffling 
conclusions. Many are wealthy and well-educated. Few are obviously 
depressed or mentally ill. While most are indeed devoted to a cause, 
that cause is more likely to be national than religious, and even more 
likely to involve an injured sense of family or personal honor. Watching 
Rishawi turning around to reveal the weapons strapped to her body, it 
occurred to me that this is her 15 minutes of fame, her chance to make 
her mark on the world. She wanted to do it with smoke, blood and death 
-- but presumably being featured on CNN and al-Jazeera is a good second 
best.

By definition, suicide bombers are harder to deter than ordinary 
criminals. Normal punishments don't work: The execution of Rishawi might 
serve her ends, creating a new martyr. Normal prevention doesn't work 
either: After all, she looked just like the other wedding guests. The 
impossibility of distinguishing between bombers and ordinary people is 
part of the horror of suicide bombing and adds to the damage of such 
attacks too. In Iraq, the suicide bombing campaign has made every 
American look at every Iraqi -- male and female, old and young -- with 
suspicion.

There is a solution, of course, but it isn't one that can be applied by 
the American military or even the Jordanian police. To stop the Rishawis 
of the future, her community -- her family, her compatriots, the 
Jordanians marching in the streets last week -- must change the culture 
that celebrates self-immolation and that sick form of honor and pride. 
If the desire for murderous glory is what makes suicide bombers act as 
they do, then scorn from all across the Muslim world on whose behalf she 
thought she was acting is the only lasting deterrent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR2005111501317.html?nav=hcmodule
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