A Casualty of the War: Martyrdom

One thing the U.S. military has accomplished in Afghanistan and Iraq: It’s blasted a crater in the foundation that upholds radical Islamic martyrdom.

All those headliners: Saddam, Osama, Uday and Qusai, Mullah Mohammed Omar, Ayman Zawahari -- just where were they when it came to fighting for what they believed? Where was their sacrifice for an honored place in the afterlife? How did they meet their “duty”?

Cowering in a bunker? Delivering instructions for “Jihad!” into a long-distance cell phone? Waiting for the salad course at a fancy restaurant? Running for the border, clean-shaven and masquerading as a pregnant woman? Holed down somewhere in a cave or a distant villa?

And remember last month in Pakistan? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda’s 9/11 “mastermind,” was nabbed in his hide-out and led away as meek and bedraggled as a man busted for trying to palm someone else’s nickels during an all-night bender at the Vegas slots.

With the world looking on, the lions had a chance to roar their way into martyrdom.

Wonder why they didn’t take it?

Iraq and Al Qaeda were not much as allies. But their leaders, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, came to champion the same vainglory: human sacrifice. The suicide belt. The truck bomb through the embassy gate. The airplane into the high-rise. All in the name of duty. In the name of God.

We can be squeamish when it comes to war, the more the better. But fighting for what you believe remains an idea as cherished in the U.S. as it is in the cultures of other peoples. And let’s remember that Americans venerate theirs who fight to the death no less than terrorists do.

In that context, the suicide attacks of Islamic radicals have been as understandable as they are pitiable and horrifying. In war, rules of proper conduct are a luxury. When confronted with Japan’s “divine wind” kamikazes at the end of World War II, the U.S. sent bombs that killed 150,000 civilians outright in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People who believe themselves right fight to win.

Suicide terrorists (our description) or martyrs (theirs) are what generals call “force multipliers.” A few do the work of many. They are evidence that the weak aren’t without power. They represent will against technological might. Since the grim ritual took hold in the Mideast in 1982, suicide martyrs have become recruiting symbols for more suicide martyrs. If we believe what they say in their occasional recorded farewells, these executioners expect to be honored by their families and their people for their bravery.

Bin Laden trained them and took them global; Hussein offered cash rewards to their families and in his desperate hour tried to rally their support.

But we can doubt whether it is a self-sustaining tactic, particularly in a deeply rooted religion like Islam, which some scholars tell us explicitly forbids suicide. Warfare of any kind depends on soldiers either believing in or fearing their leaders. Sacrifice of the chilling magnitude of suicide warfare demands far more. It requires inveiglers who are as fanatic and committed as the disciples they would summon to duty. Somebody has to convince you, really convince you, that jeweled couches, servants, “loving companions” and “fruits you’ve never tasted” await in Islam’s hereafter if only you will forfeit your days on Earth to indiscriminately slaughter people.

“Jihad is no longer quite as cool an idea as it was,” Salman Rushdie wrote after Al Qaeda and the Taliban fled in Afghanistan. “Dead or alive, Bin Laden and Omar look like yesterday’s men, unholy warriors who forced martyrdom on others while running for the hills themselves.”

It looks even less cool a year later, as cameras take us on tours of Hussein’s decadent palaces, where he played sugar daddy to Palestinian martyrs and droned on about the sacred duty of Arabs to stand and bloody the invaders. Weren’t those packed presidential suitcases found at one of them?

“Take your chance, my beloved,” said a statement read in Hussein’s name during the fighting. “It is your chance for immortality.”

From a presumed haven as far from trouble as he could get, the shadowy Bin Laden supposedly did his part with a tape recording to Arabs: “They should take up arms because this is their duty as Muslims. And God said, ‘They should pick up their arms and kill all those who are infidels.’ ”

Strange now, isn’t it, to notice the absence of “I” or “our” in these battle cries?

Suicide warfare is bigger than just a few men, of course, and it’s unlikely to retreat or disappear because they do. Just last week, Hezbollah, the radical group that has nothing to offer the world except martyrdom, sounded the call for still more of it.

But the world came to know the leaders and protectors of Al Qaeda and the fallen tyrants of Iraq as big lions of the cause. And at the moment when the pages of history turned, these men who decried the cowardice and corruption of Westerners showed how small they really were.