THE FALLACY OF ISLAMIC 'NATIONAL SUICIDE'
By George Bisharat

Los Angeles Times
June 9 2008
CA

Not only is the neocon incantation wrong, it's also a dangerous idea
that could be used to justify more preemptive wars.

Anew buzzword is arising from the network of Israeli think tanks
and security-oriented academic departments bent on instigating a
U.S. attack on Iran: "national suicide." The term describes a supposed
Arab Muslim tradition of politically motivated suicide at the national,
not just individual, level. Arab Muslim regimes have purportedly
launched ruinous wars they could not have reasonably hoped to win,
condemning their nations to destruction.

The notion of an "irrational" and thus untrustworthy Iranian regime
has already been widely discussed in the U.S. It is regularly invoked
by Sen. John McCain on the stump. The term "national suicide" advances
the notion and gives it a patina of academic respectability.

Israeli jurist and former Knesset member Amnon Rubinstein recently
editorialized on "national suicide" in the Jerusalem Post. Citing
Israeli army Lt. Col. Ari Bar Yossef, Rubinstein offered Saddam
Hussein, Yasser Arafat and the Taliban in Afghanistan as exemplars of
this new construct. Hussein could have avoided overthrow by giving
U.N. arms inspectors free rein to search his country. Arafat, after
the failure of the Camp David peace talks, could have continued
negotiating but resorted to violence. Finally, the Taliban could
have given up Osama bin Laden to the U.S. but instead invited
self-destruction. All this because, per Rubinstein, these leaders
prefer dying to "negotiating with infidels."

"National suicide" will soon be an incantation by neoconservative
and other pro-Israeli pundits and politicians on the "bomb Iran"
bandwagon. Its strategic implications are clear: We can't trust
irrational regimes because they are not deterred by threat of
annihilation. Therefore, extraordinary actions -- such as preemptive
attack -- may be not only justified but necessary. It further
shifts moral responsibility to the victim. In the "national suicide"
formulation, it is the martyr that chooses death, while the actual
killers are merely the instrument by which the suicide -- or, as the
case may be, the destruction of a country -- is carried out.

Yet the idea of an Arab Muslim tendency toward self-destruction is
wrongheaded and dangerous.

"National suicide" is easier to believe in if you're willing to lump
all Arabs and all Muslims into a single mind-set. For example, the
Palestinian national movement under Arafat was staunchly secular;
members of the non-Arab Taliban are Islamist extremists. The concept
elides the enormous diversity within the Arab and Muslim worlds
and ignores the local particularities of their multifarious -- and
sometimes ideologically opposed -- political movements. A hint of
these intra-regional tensions was displayed in Bin Laden's recent
audiotape denouncing Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

What of the supposed examples of "national suicide"? In fact, Hussein
allowed U.N. inspectors relatively unfettered access to his country
-- belatedly, to be sure, and under pressure from the international
community. But by then the neoconservative push for war had already
reached inevitability -- the facts be damned.

Arafat, for his part, continued negotiating after Camp David in Taba
and never chose to ignite the second intifada. The uprising was sparked
by Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Al Aqsa mosque and was
fueled by Palestinians' sense of betrayal over a peace process that
brought no peace but doubled the number of Israeli settlers on their
land. The "Arafat chose violence" canard was rejected by the Mitchell
report. Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service,
concluded: "Yasser Arafat neither prepared nor triggered the intifada."

Finally, if members of the Taliban committed suicide, they are an
uncommonly vigorous corpse. They are still hanging tough and continue
to resist the U.S. on the battlefield.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a convenient whipping
boy. He has frequently predicted Israel's eventual demise, and yet
-- accurately translated -- he has not threatened it with offensive
attack. Nor does he command the country's armed forces.

Israel, with an estimated 100 to 200 nuclear warheads, should fear
no existential threat from Iran. But Iran is a source of inspiration
and material support to Hezbollah and Hamas, two forces that harass
Israel and impede its regional hegemony. Israel's local challenges
are insufficient to justify a U.S. strike on Iran -- thus the need
to gin up "national suicide" and the specter of nuclear Armageddon.

Iran is a nation of 70 million people, many of them discontented with
their government's performance. Nothing would unite and rally them
around the current regime better than a foreign attack.

We dearly need sobriety and responsible conduct in our relations with
Iran and the broader Middle East. We do not need another reckless
venture impelled by fanciful terms and politically motivated spin.

George Bisharat is a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San
Francisco and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.