Professor of political science Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has made an academic specialty of studying suicide terrorism. He writes in today’s ChiTrib of “The strategic logic of suicide terrorism and how to defeat it.” Sadly, he connects some dots that aren’t there.

Pape’s thesis is flawed from the beginning, for he apparently misunderstands what the war or terrorism (WOT) is about. This error has two related parts. Pape’s first error is in assuming that the WOT is mainly a war against suicide terrorism, rather than Islamist extremism.

Since Sept. 11, the United States has responded to the growing threat of suicide terrorism by embarking on a policy to conquer Muslim countries-not simply rooting out existing havens for terrorists in Afghanistan, but going further to remake Muslim societies in the Persian Gulf.

It’s true, as Pape says, that Islamism often manifests itself in suicide attacks, but Islamists are just as likely (if not more) to detonate unattended bombs, such as in Madrid 2004 or using IEDs in Iraq. Al Qaeda even mounts conventional armed attacks against relatively weak targets, as they have unsuccessfully done in Iraq on several occasions.

The WOT’s objectives are not merely to bring cessation to suicide attacks, but to “dry up the swamp” in which Islamism grows. By Pape’s lights, if al Qaeda et. al. were suddenly to stop using suicide bombers, we will have won the war. But suicide terrorism is simply one arrow in al Qaeda’s quiver. It has used and will continue to use other means to attack us. Pape has confused the enemy’s tactics with their objectives.

(I wrote in 2003 that al Qaeda does not actually have a strategic plan, a conclusion that the New York Times got around to drawing only last month. But they do have a strategic goal.)

By micro-focusing rather than macro, Pape says of his research,

The facts show that suicide terrorist attacks are not primarily an outgrowth of Islamic fundamentalism and are, almost always, part of an organized campaign to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider home.

Too much can easily be made, as Prof. Pape does, of the fact that not just Islamist terrorists conduct suicide attacks. It may well be true that, “The world leader is the LTTE in Sri Lanka, a Marxist group that is completely secular and that draws its recruits from Hindu families.” It is also irrelevant because LTTE has not declared war against the United States as al Qaeda has. It is true that Osama bin Laden and other Islamists want US forces out of Islamic countries. But bin Laden has made it plain that he not only wants US military forces out of the Persian Gulf, he also wants every non-Muslim out, military or not, American or not. Suicide bombing in Saudi Arabia, for example, has not been directed only at US forces, but also American diplomatic housing areas. In April 2004, British police foiled an extensive plot to suicide-bomb thousands of soccer fans at a Manchester United-Liverpool soccer match, hardly a military target in “territory that the terrorists consider home.”

To say that the target of suicide bombings is “the forces of democracy” is to confuse, again, the means of the attack with the goals of the terrorists. What Islamists despise is democracy itself. Witness that in recent months the suicide bombers in Iraq have increasingly turned to attacking the democratic institutions of free Iraq and its people. Not only have they struck the Iraqi military but also Iraqi police and strictly civilian targets. Suicide bombers are a means of attack against democracy as an idea and political operation, not just democracy’s military forces.

This misunderstanding leads Prof. Pape to prescribe a simplistic, erroneous strategy:

Over the next year, the United States should transfer responsibility for Iraq’s security and buildup and control of the Iraqi army to Iraq’s government and begin a systematic withdrawal of ground troops from the region.

This prescription is flawed for three reasons:

1. It fails to account for the fact that the Islamists’ objective is to emplace Taliban-like governments in Iraq and elsewhere in the Gulf. The near-term withdrawal of US forces from Iraq will enable them to do so even if they abandon suicide attacks as a tactic. Stopping suicide attacks will be the result of America achieving its strategic goals, not the cause of their achievement.

2. It falls into the “timetable” trap, the false supposition that our enemies can be appeased if they know we are abandoning the fight. All setting a timetable does is give the enemy the date of their victory.

3. Prof. Pape discounts the religious motivations of Islamist suicide bombers apparently for no reason other than religion did not motivate some other bombers, the LTTE, for example. Certainly Islamism does not mandate suicide bombing, but its core Muslim tenets make it attractive to impressionable Muslims. See here.

Suicide bombing is not the enemy, it is merely a tactic. The nation’s strategy against Islamist terrorists has never been simply to stop suicide bombing, nor should it be so misdirected in the future.