suicide and comments

Here’s the Worm’s Eye for this week, since I had two really thoughtful letters, published as comments.

Walking the largely deserted streets of Jerusalem you have plenty of time to reflect that suicide bombing is an extraordinarily effective weapon. It’s not particularly good at killing people; but it is unsurpassed as a means of frightening and demoralising to the enemy. Since wars and battles are much more often won by breaking the enemies’ will to fight, rather than killing them all, this makes suicide bombing a tactic to be feared and discouraged. But is it also particularly immoral? The question is very sharp in Britain this week, where there is outrage over the visit of Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a noted Islamic jurisprudent, who has condemned Pokemon toys because in their evolution they make Darwinism credible, and praised suicide bombers as martyrs. It can’t be ducked by claiming that his judgements on morality are as ridiculous as his opinions on biology.

What makes suicide bombing so very frightening is that it appeals to the apocalyptic imagination of the victims, as well as the perpetrators. The suicide bomber turns a commuting crowd into a cold war of all against all, in which no one can be trusted. In this respect, the suicide bomber fulfils the fears of the 1930s, in which air raids were imagined as all being as sudden as Guernica, erupting without warning from a peaceful sky. That shocked the world, even though the bombing of civilians came to seem perfectly moral when we practised it ourselves. What makes the argument difficult is that the bombing of civilians that we did was justified much as suicide bombing is today.

Sheikh Al-Qaradari has said that suicide bombing is a perfectly legitimate way fro Palestinians to defend their country when they have no other means of hitting back. These are more or less the grounds on which Churchill justified the bombing of German civilians when the Germans had occupied all of Europe. Using bombers was the only way open to us to carry the war to the enemy.

Of course the Nazis were evil in a way that the state of Israel just isn’t. But the justice of any particular cause is irrelevant if we’re considering the intrinsic immorality of particular weapons. It may seem that our bombers were different because they had the intention of surviving their missions. But at some stages of the war, this intention was pretty unrealistic. The American Air force accepted a casualty rate of 5% per mission, which sounds like tolerable odds until you realise that a tour of duty meant 25 missions. So the odds of surviving a whole tour were around one in four. Climbing into those planes, time after time, required the kind of heroism that defies imagination.

That small, tormenting chance of survival means that the men of the USAAF were braver than suicide bombers are. But the point is that they were admired partly because their courage seemed, as we say, suicidal.

One can see the moral appeal of suicide very clearly by looking at one culture which separated the suicide from the bombing. The IRA hunger strikers were convicted terrorists. Many of them had killed innocent civilians. Their actions, were defended on the grounds that they were fighting a just war of national liberation; and this claim, however wicked and ludicrous, was treated respectfully in the USA.

Yet it is reasonable to say that their suicide did more harm to their enemies than their bombs managed and was much more widely admired. The clergy denounced it as wicked and immoral, but among the laity and the irreligious it was felt to add legitimacy to their cause. The gold standard of sincerity is to ask whether someone would be prepared to die for a cause. Once more: if you justify the bombing, and admire the suicide, what is the moral objection to suicide bombers?

This is not a problem that can be solved by any sort of relativism: by saying that certain cultures think that suicide bombings are OK, but that we (Guardian readers) don’t. There is a conflict within our own attitudes. It arises, I think, from our faith that all the virtues ought to be compatible with each other. In the ideal society, there would be no tragedy, because there would be no irreconcilable virtues. If good men seem to be fighting for a bad cause, then either their goodness or its badness must be illusory. But this won’t do. To return where I started, to the empty streets of Jerusalem, where I walked this spring past a bombed caf