The following is an email exchange I had with Nicole Argo, one of the panel on suicide terrorism that I panned recently here. That is, it was unfair to the extent that some of my criticism wasn't so much substantive as atmospheric, and it may also have been unfair to Argo. I still disagree with Pape's policy prescriptions, which I think do not follow from his analysis, and I thought Bloom's attitude rather superficial and trite, reflecting the "unseriousness" of the Moveon crowd. And I still have the sense that the way nearly all of these people frame the issue of suicide terrorism reflects a false dichotomy between "military" and "non-military" strategy.

In the 1940s Roosevelt created an agency that he called the "Board of Economic Warfare," which was chaired, rather ironically, by R. Buckminster Fuller. While this agency wasn't "military," its design purpose was unambiguously to serve the military campaign. If there is value in the work of these researchers attempting to understand the nature of terrorism it probably is not in an alternative to a military strategy, but in service to it... with the laudable objective of preventing a drift toward what Clausewitz calls "Total War."

But Argo was quite gracious in the following note, and in a follow-up (which I won't post because I haven't quite figured out how to respond yet). Anyway, here's the exchange. The quotes from my original post are in bold, her comments in italics, and my responses in plain old, plain old.

hi there,

a friend sent me this, and you actually had me laughing. i don't dispute your take on the tone of that panel, however you cite me and other incorrectly. let me correct the pieces dealing with my presentation, at least...

I was fairly bitter at the time, having just experienced some serious discrimination for my lack of "PC-ness," so my tone was a bit over the top. Sorry, but I sometimes get carried away. As soon as I have time I'll bring the post back to the top and intersperse your comments, for the record.

I neglected to mention a statement by Nichole Argo to the effect that suicide terrorists are "just like us," meaning that they are socio-economically middle class, educated, etc. That struck me as improbable, although she is supposed to be the expert.

i referenced a study of lebanese and palestinian bombers (by alan krueger) which first showed that bombers tend to be above the mean in education and income for their societies (these were all bombers, and many terrorists, from the 80s and 90s). but sageman's network analysis of 400+ qaeda bombers also shows this. and that network is growing. however, i originally chose the words "they're just like us" to sum up the study on psychopathology: we have yet to find depression or sociopathy to describe the terrorists we're finding, or those we research after the fact.

My impression, from some of the reports by our troops on milblogs, is that many of the bombers in Iraq are not above the mean in income or education, but then that's also just their impression. It does make some sense to me that literature on the psychopathology of suicide bombers follows that of other cults and extremist groups... which tends to say that we're all vulnerable. I just think that there's some deliberate exploitation of the sunni underclass in Iraq. But I don't really know.

I do agree with Jerrold Post, however, that there's something about the group dynamic itself that produces the equivalent of a psychopathology. It's pretty ugly business, but I tend to see a close relationship between these groups and more established totalitarian groups, as though they're different phases of the same phenomenon.

Later Pape, in his summary, acknowledged that only about 10-15% of the suicide bombers have been identified, and there's no way to tell if those were a representative sample.

pape was talking about bombers from iraq.

My mistake. [Here, I thought Argo's comments were about terrorists in general, and didn't know she was excluding Iraq. Well... because I didn't here her say so...]

Now, I don't know what the background of these revealed bombers was, or the roughly 85% who are still unknown, but if these were people from the same socio-economic background as the rest of us it sort of undermines the notion that terrorism is the consequence of class conflict, or the result of exploitation or deprivation.

nobody in that panel argued that terrorism was the result of class conflict, exploitation or deprivation. "grievance" was used mostly to connote "occupation" and resentment towards status change and/or oppression (another finding of alan krueger, who argues bombing will most likely occur in those countries with low civil-political liberties).

Well if that's the case (and I agree for both intuitive and analytical reasons) then I just don't understand the "principled" opposition to this project from people like Pape and Bloom. Unless they think that civil political liberties can somehow flow into a totalitarian or authoritarian state through some kind of economic bargaining and external pressure. While these things may work, they usually take a very long time and have uncertain consequences. I suppose I developed some faith in the ability of Ameriacans to sow the seeds of civil democratic reform, by force, from my association with Lipset. And I see "the Left" as, at best, unaware of that potential.

[I'm being rather diplomatic here. The truth is, I think class is essential to the left's opposition to the Iraq War, and to the whole "Neocon Project." But I can't really say that anyone but Bloom is "in the tank" on that approach. Pape might be, but I'm not sure. Several others on the panel definitely were not "class warriors."]

But the main point is that she was willing to state something as fact, which is simply still in doubt. We don't even know enough about suicide terrorists in Iraq, for instance, to make a definitive statement about what part of the Arab world they come from.

it's not in doubt. suicide bombers are not clinically depressed or psychopaths; they are not the most poor, the most uneducated, the most "weak"--often they are leaders. if you know a single scholar/expert in this subject that argues differently, you should post that report. as for the bombers in iraq, nobody on the APSA panel claimed to know where they come from, least of all me, who simply asked the field and the audience to make explicit the ways in which they thought religion motivated the act, rather than assume that people swallow whole the soundbites offered them by the local cleric, or the international terrorist.

Again, I don't think one has to posit that the folks who are susceptible to this kind of influence are necessarily psychopathic. But I do suspect (from my own experience at least) that something about them is different. They cross a threshold that most of us do not. There's some sort of trigger for that. As Post says about the Third Reich, the idea of a Jewish conspiracy fit some element of receptivity in the German public "like a key in a lock." This has more to do with the relationship between charisma and social status than individual psychopathology.

[Here, I just don't think we're talking about the same thing. The bombers themselves may very well be "like the rest of us," at least after you account for the differences in culture and socio-economics of the group they belong to (Palestinian, Arab, etc.). And there are extremists in this culture that seem to look more or less like the rest of us, for instance in the Heaven's Gate group and Jim Jones. The leaders themselves tend to be either cynically manipulative, or psychopathic, however.]

i don't know your blog, but can see you've a knack for writing. as someone who just got off a plane from the palestinian territories and was very jetlagged, i'd tend to agree that the panel functioned less than professionally at times. however, that is a different complaint than the one you make about poor analysis. indeed, your evidence misleads your audience, and explains why you walked away frustrated.

Probably. I'm very frustrated with people like Mia especially. To me they're the modern equivalent of Copperheads. And if they manage to influence the majority I think the Arab world may have a very high price to pay. I don't think they understand either the magnitude or the nature of the stakes.

all the best,

The best to you too. Thanks for contacting me. If there's some way to achieve agreement between the disparate factions in this dispute over policy I'll view it as deliverance. The harshness of the "whole thing" is beginning to tell, on me at least. I find it very depressing.

The bottom line is that while those who follow Galloway's example may escape some of the depressive consequences for the time being they're doing so by deferring the real consequences of their moral and ethical inconsistency onto others, and onto their own future. This makes them precisely like the Copperheads during the American Civil War, who deferred the consequences of their own moral and ethical inconsistencies onto the black slave population, which they would have left in slavery in order to stop the war. The Moveon Left defer the consequences of their inconsistency onto the victims of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. And even as the Copperheads ultimately paid the price, politically, by remaining out of power almost seventy years the modern Copperheads may pay a similar price. It isn't difficult to see that they've become more like the reactionaries and fascists they claim to hate than have people like Hitchens.

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia)

Posted by: Demosophist at 12:53 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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