The Italian Version

This thread on LGF began commenting the assertion of a moonbat professor of English literature (at UCLA):

Few have noticed that suicide bombing is merely a tactic used by those who lack other means of delivering explosives.

The rest of his/her article is just an anti-western rant punctuated by a number of hystorical imprecisions and distortions, and utterly marred by ideological blindness.

But I think that this assertion alone is not so wrong as many think.

It takes quite a while to explain my position, however.

The first point to notice is that many readers on LGF take on this issue from a strictly moral standpoint. What they do is to consider terrorism evil in a moral sense. Also, for the most part they use faulty definitions of terrorism, ones that focus on the targetting of civilians.

One problem with this is that in the age of industrial, and also of information-age war, the distinction between civilians and military makes little sense.

Another is that if you consider the whole problem of war in strictly moral terms, you risk falling into traps of your own making: deliberately targeting civilians is wrong (and terrorist), right? So, how do you classify certain past actions of the US and UK ?

Yes, I'm talking about the strategic bombings of WW2. There is a lot to be said about the technological limitations of the age, and the fact that many bombing raids were aimed at military targets, sure. But this is not enough to explain everything: at least some bombig run explicitely targeted civilians (you can't honestly tell me that the firebombing of Tokyo was aimed only at military targets and the rest was regrettable collateral damage) and in general the Allied forces dropped millions of bombs without caring whether civilians would be harmed or not. And, to go deeper, what about those factories that produced dual-use goods, and were bombed to rubble often killing lots of workers who surely were not soldiers? What about the cargo ships (a lot of Italian ones, too) that were sunk in those years together with their civilian crews? Even the Nazis - who were utterly evil in many ways - with their Blitz and submarine warfare did nothing more than apply the doctrine of total war. Later, massive bombings regardless of civilian presence were employed in the Vietnam war - and the whole MAD doctrine was about exterminating the other side, not just destroying its armed forces (can you honestly argue that multimegaton nuclear warheads are meant to be used only against military targets?).

Nowadays, most Western armies do not fight with he doctrine of Total War, but that's mainly because today's enemies are not nation states (at least not as Germany, Japan and Italy were), and the weapons technology allows for much more accurate targeting. But if China and the USA would actually come to the point of violent war, you will probably see strategic bombing and thus carnage on a scale never witnessed before. To cite only one case.

Applying a definition of terrorism that focuses on the civilian casualties would require to define all of the above actions as terrorism, in the best case with attenuating circumstances.

If you take a strictly moral stance, the only way to legitimate the acts I described is to state that those civilians were evil, because they either supported the dictatorial regimes, or did not oppose them strongly enough (and the latter already is a pretty weird definition of evil).

So, on LGF often you end up with people who, literally, in one sentence state that "Only those murderous scum of terrorists deliberately target innocent civilians; we are the Good Guys and we never do that!" and in the next one say "Well, except when it is necessary or unavoidable, and please Nuke Mecca now!".
Hard to tell how nuking Mecca would not end up with massive civilian casualties, I say. And anyway the whole thing is rather contradictory. Someone tried to contend that Mecca is a military target: show me the soldiers, the weapons and hardware then (not a couple of crates of assault rifles). I suspect that their definition of "military target" is different from mine, and I learnt there is little to do in these cases.

Instead, I see war and conflicts in general from an utilitarian perspective: there are two or more sides each one with certain objectives, which are in conflict with the objectives of the other(s). If it is not possible to reach a peaceful agreement, shooting war will erupt. And in this kind of war your strategies and tactics will be tailored to the objectives to accomplish; one can clearly see that in this way the trappings I described above can be avoided. Yes, there is a risk of becoming completely amoral going too straight down this may. But amoral I am not; in the end it's an individual matter.
We surely are the "good guys" compared to the Islamists, however.

At LGF, there also seems to be some confusion about the distinction between tacticts and strategy on one side and motivations on the other: motivations are why you fight, while the rest is how you fight (the two fields are not completely indipendent, tho).

How you fight depends mainly from your resources and technological and industrial capabilities, when the objectives are set. If your objective is, say, the assassination of a hostile foreign leader, you won't use tanks or ballistic missiles; rather, a small team of Special Forces soldiers with light weapons.

It is a central tenet of all the historical theories of Marxist derivation that people will fight because they are impoverished, exploited and oppressed. While this can be occasionally true, these are not the motivations of the jihadis; they fight because their ideology is hateful and violent (and some of them are hungry for power), in short.

So, let's finally come to the core of the issue, the suicide bombings.

To the dismay of some, I have to say that is actually is a tactic. If we examine it from a strictly technical standpoint, we'll see that a suicide bomber is a tiny anti-personnel warhead with the ultimate guidance and fuzing systems, and this allows for the most efficient use of small amounts of explosive.

And who has only small amounts of explosive? Those entities that have little resources, no significant industrial capability and/or poor logistics. In other words, those that already use terrorism and guerrilla in order to reduce the gap between them and regular armies backed and mantained by nation-states.

So it is true that sucide bombing is a tactic used by those who have no better weapons.
It is also true that particularly brutal and cruel tactics generally are the result of evil intentions, but not always.

Let's be frank here: the Palestinians receive millions in aid (and it's way past time to close those taps) and have a few tons of explosives and maybe thousands of individual weapons. But compared to modern armies such as their direct antagonist the IDF, that is pretty ridiculous. One single 250 kg bomb contains enough explosive for dozens of explosive vests, and the IAF has probably several thousands of bombs in stock, and can easily acquire more. I'm not sure of the annual budget of the Israeli armed forces, but I would estimate it in the order of billions of dollars - that is, much bigger of what the Palestinians can muster.

What about the Kassam rockets and mortars, you may ask. Those systems are much less efficient, that is the point. Their accuracy is lousy, and their warheads have little power. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I'd estimate that rockets and mortars have caused only a fraction of the casualties produced by suicide bombers. Also, rockets and mortars require metal and other components, that must be manufactured and assembled, and used by trained personnel. It's a much less efficient use of resources.

I am not making the trite argument that the Palestinians have only rocks and sticks while the Israelis are fully armed, and thus the Palestinians obtain some kind of moral superiority: that stuff is for the cultists of victimhood. I am stating the facts.

Of course it does not all end with rational analysis of the military issues. The Palestinians use suicide bombers also because their culture is poisoned with hatred and the cult of martyrdom. "Martyrs" are respected, praised and idolized (much like sportsmen or pop stars in the West), and many of the Palestinians are convinced that dying for Allah will cleanse any previous sin and dishonour, and send you straight to heaven.

If the reality about suicide bombing is distasteful, that's not enough to mean that the reality must be different.