COULD THE RESORT to the suicide bomb in European cities be just another craze? Could it pass? Might there be an element of fashion — a grisly sort of terrorist-chic — about the tactic? I think so. We could one day look back on the era of al-Qaeda and the suicide bomb as we now look back on the Bader-Meinhoff gang and the Red Brigades in West Germany, student riots or the wave of aeroplane hijackings in the 1970s: cults and practices which at the time we thought might dominate the decades ahead, but which in the event never did. They fizzled out.
So will this, if we keep our nerve. Keeping our nerve does not mean, as Messrs Bush and Blair exhort, girding ourselves for war against the forces of darkness. That glorifies our enemies (and Messrs Bush and Blair). The war is not against evil but against silliness. The bombers are not evildoers inhabited by Satan; they are poor fools inhabited by superstition. They are credulous muppets. They are pathetic.
Let me tell you why I predict a limited future for the suicide bomb, so long as we do not allow ourselves to become fixated on the threat. Once you see how tactically ridiculous is the suicide bomb you will see that our fixation with it is the most interesting thing about it; and to that horrified fixation I shall return, for it is strong among us and there are deep reasons for this; but on dispassionate analysis you will see that the horror is the only advantage a suicide bomb in London offers over the timed or remotely activated explosive device (I shall call this the “planted” bomb) which spares its carrier’s life.
Ask yourself what is supposed to be so clever about the suicide bomb as a terrorist tactic. We have settled into the assumption that by adding this arrow to their quiver our enemies have horribly enhanced their capabilities, but we have not bothered to identify these. A wailing chorus of pundits and commentators has convinced itself that, with the arrival of Britain’s first suicide bombers, the scale of the devastation we have to fear — the efficacy of the merchants of death — has moved up a notch.
But why? What it is that the suicide bomber can do that the man with a suitcase-bomb, a two-minute timing device and a good pair of legs cannot?
The suicide bomber does have a couple of practical advantages, but only in a limited range of circumstances, and not in London or in most of Europe or America. The planted bomb is less easily carried into the middle of a military checkpoint in Baghdad. The carrier would be seen and shot and his intended victims might have time to escape the blast.
The carrier of the planted bomb is less likely successfully to blow up a queue of would-be Iraqi recruits outside a Basra police station. Their eyes will be skinned and anyone among them abandoning a bag would be spotted in the act. They would run.
In both cases the would-be bomb-planter would almost certainly be shot while escaping. Knowing this, it is rational for him to opt for suicide — and greater glory.
The carrier of the planted bomb stands less chance than the suicide-bomber of getting deep into a Tel-Aviv restaurant, night-club or bus-queue. People with bags or suitcases are more likely to be noticed in Israel the instant they put them down; and the range of crowded places into which you are allowed to take an unchecked bag in Israel is narrower.
But Britain is not Iraq or Israel. Our cities are a crush of people carrying packages. True, we are training ourselves to watch for unattended bags and after a few minutes there is a reasonable chance that such a thing would be reported on the Tube or bus or in a shop or bar. But surely it has occurred to you that it would be relatively easy to leave a bag in a crowded place with a good chance, 90 seconds later, of its being remotely detonated, or with a timing device, before the place could be evacuated? The IRA’s failure to do this may have persuaded us that it would have been difficult. The truth was that it was not its policy.
From the terrorists’ point of view there is no need for suicide bombing in the British urban environment. In London the suicide bomber enjoys no advantage over those who plant bombs and run.
In fact he suffers from two serious disadvantages. By his death he identifies himself — indeed, wants to. His family and friends, his contacts, his movements and his telephone calls, can be traced. From the point of view of the “mastermind” the suicide bomber is a serious headache. Every atrocity becomes a point from which lines can be traced back to the centre. Better by far the bomber who can slip away undetected, to strike again.
Which brings me to the second disadvantage for the suicide bomber. He dies. For him personally this may not appear as a problem — he has hopes of Paradise — but here on Earth his commanders have lost one of their army. It makes little sense militarily to lose a man every time you strike, unless this is unavoidable. The ability of the Washington neocons and their British camp-followers to believe two contradictory things at once is nowhere better illustrated than by the way that their belief that “terror” can be “fought” by killing or capturing its perpetrators is coupled with belief that suicide-bombing represents the evildoers’ campaign at its most lethal.
But with every suicide bomb there is one fewer terrorist in the world. If neocons draw no comfort from this — though their own theory of war suggests that they should — then maybe they are less confident in their philosophy of “taking out” the terrorist than they seem.
Which brings me to the key to the legend of the suicide bomb: its real, its only, advantage over devices that do not kill their carriers. It confounds the modern Western mind, and because it evidently confounds us, it inspires new recruits to the bombers’ cause.
“You love life, while we love death.” Thus, shortly after 9/11, did al-Qaeda frame in seven chilling words the idea that baffles and horrifies the modern secular mind. There were in fact very few kamikaze Japanese pilots, but to us the legend is almost the most memorable thing about the Japanese war effort. The Buddhists who used to set fire to themselves during the Vietnam War perplexed and upset the Americans in a not dissimilar way. How could anyone feel so strongly? How could anyone be so confident of the persistence of their soul? How could anyone really believe in their religion or their emperor like that? Our incredulity may be part of the reason we search so frantically for “a mastermind”: we cannot think that anyone would do such things purely of his own volition. In some buried part of ourselves I suspect that we, the faithless, the “moderate” Christian and the secular Jew, see the suicide bomber as a reproach. We are secretly afraid not of his dynamite, but of his conviction.
And if we are picking up from the “mainstream” Muslim communities in Britain an occasional ambivalence, I wonder whether the explanation is allied to that. I have visited the oases in Algeria where, centuries ago, Muslims who felt that the “mainstream” was losing the faith, trekked to start again; and I have visited the oases of second resort, yet further-flung, whither trekked the Muslims who felt that the “mainstream” in the oasis of first resort were also losing the faith. Are Christians too not troubled by the suspicion that the flame of their faith is not really carried in the “mainstream”?
Now for the difficult part. If “terror” is to be spearheaded by suicide bombers, and if the suicide bomber’s real weapon is our horror of his conviction, then the “War” against “Terror” must become the war against horror: our own. We must acknowledge, confront and shake off our respect for the suicide bomber. His tactic is pitiful. Scorn and disregard, not shock and awe, are the right response.
