THE WEAPON OF MARTYRDOM

 Artículo de Jim Hoagland  en “The Washington Post” del 26/12/2004

Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)

Kris Kringle and George W. Bush, Time's Person of the Year for the second time, must share the spotlight in this holiday season of retrospective rumination with a spectral figure intent on changing our times: the suicide bomber.

Assassins eager or willing to die to vent their destructive fury have always been with us. But the modern bombers, who deserve collectively to be 2004's Fiend of the Year, have achieved new heights of horror through the power of compact explosives and their zeal to destroy what others create or try to protect.

The suicide bomber is the cutting-edge weapon of campaigns to drive U.S. troops out of the Middle East, to prevent Iraqis from holding elections, and to wreak revenge and retribution on Israelis, Australians and Indians, among others. The human weapon is the deadly tool we understand least and defend ourselves against most inadequately.

Was the Mosul bomber, who perished in killing and wounding scores of Americans and Iraqis in a U.S. Army mess hall on Tuesday, driven by religious fanaticism, political calculation or external manipulation? We know little at this stage beyond the tragic certainties of the extinguished or broken lives of the fallen.

Even after the exhaustive work of the Sept. 11 commission, we are essentially still guessing about the forces that made Mohamed Atta and his co-conspirators exult in the chance to end their own lives so that Americans would die with them on that dark day.

Their willingness to commit suicide by converting the airliners they had boarded into flying bombs collapsed U.S. defenses and launched a new era of the suicide bomber in international affairs. Much more than Osama bin Laden's alleged organizational genius, their fascination with violent death changed the world forever.

There may be as many explanations for suicidal killing as there are assassins who practice it. It is easy to underestimate bribery and physical coercion as recruiting tools in the Middle East, which contributed the word "assassin" to the world.

Psychologically vulnerable people willing to die to enrich or protect their families from threatened harm are prominent among the recruits who are captured or surrender. With Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" or Stringer Bell of "The Wire" on HBO, these would-be mass murderers explain that this is not personal, it's just business.

But they too are shaped by a cultural and religious context that places suicide bombing on a spectrum that runs from acceptable to extremely desirable. Americans must understand and defend against a form of warfare that is at once tactic and strategy, form and substance, method and madness.

The Sept. 11 commission's report is a useful starting point. It properly takes care not to blame one of the world's great religions for atrocities committed by a few of its adherents. But the commission goes on to note that the United States faces a clear threat from "Islamist" -- not Islamic -- terrorism, which "is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, thus distorting both."

That concise description goes to the heart of the matter of death vs. life. Islamic countries have long been locked in a decline, in the commission's apt words, into becoming "flammable societies" plagued by "political, social and economic problems" that sap creativity, tolerance and opportunity.

Atta, the German-trained Egyptian engineer, destroyed skyscrapers he never could have created. Bin Ladenism would destroy politics, and especially democratic choice. On this bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other dictators had no differences.

The suicide artists find a meaning in death that they do not find in life, whether in their own broken societies or the more dynamic conditions of the West. They would erase the dividing line between religion and politics -- a line that constantly shifts in open societies to reflect changing moral and material conditions -- in order not to have to face choice and its consequences.

The "no exit" grimness of life in those "flammable societies" also shows up in the horrific exaltation of death and gore on Arab satellite television. Networks such as al-Jazeera exploit a pornography of the morbid and hopeless as surely as HBO exploits the pornography of sex with its interviews of hookers.

More body and vehicle armor, better surveillance, tighter border controls, drying up the financial support for terrorism -- these are all needed immediate steps to defend against human bombs at home and in Iraq. But in the long term, success can come only from enlisting and aiding moderate Muslims in transforming their societies from breeding grounds for cults of death into places that instill an unquenchable desire to live.