Without Effort to Overthrow Saddam, Bombing Strikes Are Counterproductive

Ahmad Chalabi is president of the executive council of the main Iraqi opposition coalition to Saddam's rule, the Iraqi National Congress. His comments here are adapted from a conversation with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels in London on December 17.     

The radical change: From a socialist perspective to militarism (Rejoinder to Ben-Eliezer and Shamir)

Ben-Eliezer and Shamir's reply appeared in Vol. 4, No. 3 Carmi and Rosenfeld's article appeared in Vol. 3, No. 1.     

Suicide Terrorism,Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win

This article offers a three-pronged critique of Robert A. Pape's book Dying to Win. The first section of the article highlights problems related to the book's definition of key concepts, its assessment of existing research on suicide terrorism, and its presentation of data. The next section challenges the book's argument that suicide attacks have a high success rate of 54 percent. The alternative analysis offered here arrives at a significantly lower success rate of 24 percent. The last section argues that Pape exaggerates the link between occupation and suicide terrorism, especially with regard to the case of Al Qaeda. In this context, a distinction between traditional (localized) and contemporary (globalized) patterns of suicide attacks is introduced. It is argued that the occupation thesis may help explain the traditional (localized) pattern of suicide attacks, but falls short of illuminating the causes of the contemporary “globalization of martyrdom.”     

Suicide to harass others: clues from mythology to understanding suicide bombing attacks

Suicide by revenge, the Samsonic suicide, and the suicide by devotio, all described in classical mythology and also reported in the ethnographic literature, belong to the same class of suicidal behaviors as kamikaze suicide and the suicide bombing attack: suicide to harass and burden others or suicide with a hostile intent. The lack of a social dimension to share in a positive manner may lead an individual to integrate him/herself in another social structure, e.g., a military organization, which allows the individual to express his/her desires and personal identity only by destroying others and themselves. The dynamics of these forms of suicide are also likely to work in other displays of life-threatening behavior, such as family annihilation, mass murder, and spree killing. A more thorough investigation of the dynamics operating in suicide bombing attacks could, therefore, contribute to preventative strategies against violence at large.     

The Flypaper Effect Revisited: Intergovernmental Grants and Local Governance

Abstract

Local governance arrangements shape the incentives of local actors, which may in turn influence fiscal choices. By emphasizing the role of local government institutions in local fiscal choices, we seek to bridge between median voter and Leviathan models prevalent in the literature. We then offer some preliminary evidence to support this explanation by empirically testing several propositions regarding the flypaper effect in intergovernmental grants. One limitation of the median voter model is that the model does not consider political institutions and their influences on government expenditures. In this study, we attempt to capture the influence of political dynamics in determining public expenditures by considering institutional variables. Test results show that the political institutional variables could be one of the explanation variables for the flypaper effect.     

Beyond Horror: Terrorist Atrocity and the Search for Understanding-- The Case of the Shankill Bombing

The old order has broken up. We have reached the end of a postwar world whose premises were based on terror, but whose conditions had become familiar, and even comforting, over the years. The waters we are now entering are unchartered and perhaps treacherous, and we are not likely to steer safely through them unless we have the courage to question the old assumptions which once seemed eternal and have now become so threadbare.     

Suicide Terrorism in Iraq: A Preliminary Assessment of the Quantitative Data and Documentary Evidence

This preliminary assessment of suicide terrorism in Iraq sheds light on why some groups in the insurgency employ suicide attacks although others do not. The unequal utilization of suicide bombings corresponds to divergent strategies in the insurgency. Some groups fight to achieve system reintegration, whereas others send suicide bombers to collapse the emerging political order. Quantitative data and documentary evidence substantiate the finding that suicide terrorism is carried out by groups that cannot compete in any future political and institutional alignments in Iraq's new coalition politics. Suicide terrorism is intended to produce system collapse, sectarian warfare, and a failed state.     

Suicide reporting content analysis: abstract development and reliability

Despite substantial research on media influences and the development of media guidelines on suicide reporting, research on the specifics of media stories that facilitate suicide contagion has been limited. The goal of the present study was to develop a content analytic strategy to code features in media suicide reports presumed to be influential in suicide contagion and determine the interrater reliability of the qualitative characteristics abstracted from newspaper stories. A random subset of 151 articles from a database of 1851 newspaper suicide stories published during 1988 through 1996, which were collected as part of a national study in the United States to identify factors associated with the initiation of youth suicide clusters, were evaluated. Using a well-defined content-analysis procedure, the agreement between raters in scoring key concepts of suicide reports from the headline, the pictorial presentation, and the text were evaluated. The results show that while the majority of variables in the content analysis were very reliable, assessed using the kappa statistic, and obtained excellent percentages of agreement, the reliability of complicated constructs, such as sensationalizing, glorifying, or romanticizing the suicide, was comparatively low. The data emphasize that before effective guidelines and responsible suicide reporting can ensue, further explication of suicide story constructs is necessary to ensure the implementation and compliance of responsible reporting on behalf of the media.