As far as he is concerned, the fact that Palestinian suicide attacks really only began in the 20th year of the occupation is deeply connected with the fact that most of the settlement activities on the West Bank and Gaza did not really occur until the second half of the 1980s. This professor also says the following in connection with the recent reduction in the number of Palestinian suicide attacks and the fact that the settlements are not currently spreading over a larger geographic area: “In the Palestinian case, if you look at the trajectory of the settlements year by year, you will see that an increase in settlement activity corresponds amazingly to the violence.”Pape, who asserts there is a firm link between “suicide attacks” and “occupation,” believes that what America and NATO need to do at this point is really quite basic: “Pull out the ground troops, but not immediately and not all at once. … The US and the West have to withdraw their ground forces over a period of three to four years from Iraq.” But in the end, Pape, looking at these events from the American or Western perspective, says this, too: The American military should continue using its marine and air forces to protect its interests in and around the Persian Gulf. And, if one day Iran decides to try and invade Saudi Arabia, of course, we need to do something about it. But, in order to do this, we don't need to have American soldiers in Gulf countries. We need to let the regional countries direct their own affairs. We need to stop telling the Iraqi people who they should be electing as prime minister at every election.Not only do the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan boost the number of suicide attacks that occur, they also place large and important nations such as Pakistan face to face with the risk of dissolution.
Pape, who is an expert not only on terror, but also on the role of air forces, also maintains that, like military occupations, air attacks and bombardments on nations actually achieve the opposite of their intended purpose, in that they wind up targeting and terrorizing not the enemy military, but the civilians of that nation. Recalling Israel's efforts in southern Beirut in 2006 as being aimed at breaking ground support for the Hezbullah, Pape says: "This strategy not only failed, but it actually produced a backlash, where [Hassan] Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbullah, was able to organize a rally a month after the operation in Martyrs' Square in Beirut, and something like a half million Shiites showed up. It went from having the support of a few thousand people to almost every Shiite in the country. When the Israeli soldiers were kidnapped, Hezbullah was being criticized in Egypt, Turkey and Jordan. What happened six weeks later? Hezbullah became the hero.
It could also be said that NATO is following a similar tactic in Afghanistan, with the killing of so many civilians. According to statements made by the United Nations, in 2008 alone, there were 2,100 innocent civilians killed by NATO forces in Afghanistan. And information just coming in as I write this column lets us know that on June 24, American forces killed 70 innocent civilians in an attack on a funeral convoy in the Pakistani region of southern Waziristan.
And thus, we would like to take the chance to make the following statements with regards to this matter of directly linking suicide attacks with certain clear and concrete events. According to the widely held conviction up until now, Muslims have declared that they are engaged in a “global jihad” against the Western world. This view perceives that the Muslims, unable to accept the superiority, the wealth, the freedoms and the various advantages of the West, have chosen a path of “vandalism and destruction” to do battle with whatever has been created by this Western world. But Pape rejects the allegations that what the Western world faces is a global-scale jihad against it. He says, “What is happening is that you are getting local opposition to a military presence.” In the end, we can make this observation: Wherever America heads, suicide attacks start cropping up, and wherever it decides to interfere, suicide attacks go on the rise.
According to Pape, it is wrong to call for help from Muslim religious leaders in the West in the struggle against suicide attacks. He sees the real role of Muslim community leaders in the West as putting up a political battle against the occupations and supporting other leaders searching for diplomatic solutions to these occupations.
