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IRANIAN NUKES. I was all ready to write a long post on Noah Feldman's article about the Iranian nuclear program, but that determination foundered upon my inability to figure out what Feldman was actually arguing. Feldman included a long, interesting, and rather pointless discussion of the Islamic position on suicide bombing, danced around a realist analysis of the nuclear situation in the Middle East without really committing to it, and soldiered through a discussion of Islamic theology without coming to any conclusions. Marty Peretz liked it, which means that it must have been incoherent. Fortunately, Matt Yglesias is a better man than I, and managed to slog through and produce some observations. Most notable, I think, is Matt's observation that contemporary Western discussions of suicide bombing suffer from some fatal definitional flaws:
And, again, why all the talk of suicide bombers in the context of nuclear deterrence? The West lacks a significant tradition of literal suicide missions, akin to those of kamikaze pilots or Sri Lankan or Muslim suicide bombers. We do, however, have a quite robust tradition of asking soldiers to undertake near-suicidal missions. Infantrymen are asked to charge fixed defensive positions, to go "over the top" of the trench lines, or to be in the first-wave of amphibious assaults. The 1st Infantry Division's official history of the Omaha Beach landing states that "Every officer and sergeant" in the leading company of the assault "had been killed or wounded" within ten minutes. This isn't exactly the same as suicide bombing, but it's a lot more similar to suicide bombing than suicide bombing is to deliberate, utterly foreseeable, national suicide.I would add that Feldman's treatment of suicide bombing simply ignores the work of Mia Bloom and Robert Pape, which demonstrate that suicide tactics are not solely or even predominantly Islamic in practice.
--Robert Farley
