Tag: Hezbollah

Will Germany Release an American-Killer?

On By Martin Kramer

In the next few days, Israel and Hizbullah are supposed to consummate their exchange of prisoners, bodies, and information. Germany has been the mediator in the deal. It wouldn’t be the business of the United States, except now there is a report that the Germans have promised to release a brutal Hizbullah terrorist, who in June 1985 hijacked an American airliner to Beirut, and tortured and killed a U.S. Navy diver.

The report is by Israeli journalist Aluf Benn in today’s Haaretz. Benn states that in return for Hizbullah’s disclosure about the fate of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, Germany has “slated” three persons for release—a Hizbullah operative and two Iranian agents—all imprisoned in Germany for terror attacks. “One of them,” the report goes on to say, “was convicted of murdering an American naval officer; he took orders from Imad Mughniyeh, who coordinates international terror strikes for Hezbollah.” The report relates that Germany has “promised to release” this terrorist, Muhammad Ali Hamadei, now serving a life sentence for the June 1985 hijacking of TWA 847, and for the murder of one of the passengers, Navy diver Robert Stethem.

I have no idea who is feeding Benn with information, but this story follows the newspaper’s lead story from the day before, in which Benn alluded to the same thing. So someone is floating a trial balloon—and it’s time to shoot it down, before it gains any altitude at all.

Who is Muhammad Ali Hamadei? I’m going to let Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) tell you that. This is from a statement he made on the floor of the Senate in May 1989, congratulating a German court for sentencing Hamadei to life imprisonment:

The facts of the Hamadei case shock the conscience. On June 14, 1985, Trans World Airline flight 847 departed Athens International Airport enroute to Rome, Italy with 153 passengers and crew on board, most of them Americans. Approximately 10 minutes into the flight, two hijackers, later identified as Mohammad Hamadei and Hasan Izz-al-din, commandeered the aircraft and ran through the plane brandishing hand grenades and a pistol while randomly striking the seated passengers on the head, neck, and shoulders with their weapons. The hijackers forced Chief Stewardess Uli Derickson to the flight deck area and gained access to the cockpit. The hijackers then pistol-whipped the flight crew inside the cockpit and ordered the pilot to fly to Algiers. The aircraft ultimately flew between Beirut and Algiers several times during the next 2 days while the hijackers retained control of the plane.

Once in control of the aircraft, the hijackers ordered Derickson to collect all passports and separate those of U.S. citizens and military personnel. The terrorists then ordered the military personnel into the first-class section one at a time for questioning, beginning with Navy diver Robert Stethem. The hijackers bound his arms together with an electrical cord, cutting off his circulation, and beat him until he was unconscious. Several other passengers were also beaten. Stethem regained consciousness, only to be shot in the head in cold blood. The hijackers dumped his body onto the tarmac in Beirut before several more hijackers boarded the plane for its flight back to Algiers.

The terrorists eventually abandoned the plane after its final landing in Beirut. Thirty-nine passengers were removed from the aircraft and held hostage in various locations in Beirut for 17 additional days before they finally were freed on June 30, 1985.

Hamadei, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim, was arrested in Frankfurt, West Germany. A number of the Members of this body, including this Senator, believe that the West Germans should have extradited Hamadei to the United States to stand trial in Federal district court, but that did not come to pass. While I regret the West German decision not to honor our extradition request, I commend the Germans for bringing this terrorist to justice and I applaud the West German court for imposing the maximum sentence of life imprisonment upon Hamadei.

A bit more context: the West Germans had arrested Hamadei on January 13, 1987, at the Frankfurt airport, through which he was trying to smuggle explosives. The United States immediately requested his extradition; Hizbullah immediately abducted two West Germans in Beirut, and threatened to kill them if Hamadei were extradited. That pretty much solved the dilemma for the West Germans: they would try Hamadei themselves. Even a personal appeal from President Ronald Reagan to Chancellor Helmut Kohl didn’t change their minds.

It’s been seventeen years since Hamadei’s arrest, and almost fifteen years since his conviction. In fact, there isn’t a sentence long enough for Hamadei, but he was sentenced to life, and life he should serve. He didn’t commit his ruthless crime against Germany or Israel, and Germany has no moral right to pardon or release him. His co-hijacker, Hasan Izz al-Din, is still on the FBI’s list of most-wanted terrorists for his part in the same hijacking and murder. Izz al-Din’s wanted poster offers a reward of up to $25 million for information leading to his arrest. From the U.S. point of view, the 1985 TWA hijacking is a fresh crime, and now would be a good time to remind the Germans of just that.

Want to send a reminder yourself? Tell Senator Specter to speak out again. (Contact information here.) Back in 1989, on the Senate floor, Senator Specter praised the West German criminal justice system “for convicting Mohammad Hamadei and imposing the maximum sentence of life imprisonment.” The German government should be told exactly what it would hear on the Senate floor, and across the United States, were it ever to free this American-killer.

More background: The failure to secure Hamadei’s extradition in 1987 is taught as a case study in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Many persons were interviewed for the study. The extradition, according to this account, became a bone of contention among the Justice Department, the State Department, and the National Security Council. In the end, Reagan gave Kohl an exit, much to the consternation of Justice.

Political Science Targets Suicide Terrorism. Bystanders: Take Cover!

On By Martin Kramer

The study of terrorism is the orphan of Middle Eastern studies. The Middle East academics, whose self-appointed mission is to cast their subject matter in a favorable light, simply avoid the subject. They are happiest studying putative reformers of Islam, not the terrorists who invoke it. Just look at the program of the upcoming conference of the Middle East Studies Association: not a terrorism paper in sight.

The field has been left wide open for social scientists without any particular knowledge of the Middle East. We should be grateful that some in academe are thinking about these things. The problem is that some terrorism research wobbles, precisely because it isn’t sufficiently grounded in the complexities for which the Middle East is famous.

I’m moved to write this after reading an article that has gotten a lot of play over the past few weeks. “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” is by a University of Chicago political scientist, Robert A. Pape, and it appeared in the August issue of the American Political Science Review, the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association. The publication is described by the assocation as “the preeminent political science journal in the United States and internationally,” and it is received by the association’s 14,000 members in 70 countries. Last week, Pape also published an op-ed in the New York Times, distilling his study for an even wider audience.

Pape’s thesis is really quite simple: suicide terrorism is not irrational or an expression of religious fanaticism. It is part of a strategy deliberately adopted by the groups that sponsor it. “In contrast to the existing explanations,” writes Pape, “this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays.” For that reason, too, it is used by secular groups (e.g., Tamil Tigers) even more often than by religious ones. What gives Pape’s argument its “scientific” aura is that he spent a year compiling a list of all suicide attacks that took place between 1980 and 2001 (188 in number) and infers from their timing that they took the form of deliberate campaigns.

I find all of this to be fairly obvious, so I was surprised to see myself as one of the foils of Pape’s study. Pape:

The small number of studies addressed explicitly to suicide terrorism tend to focus on the irrationality of the act of suicide from the perspective of the individual attacker. As a result, they focus on individual motives—either religious indoctrination (especially Islamic Fundamentalism) or psychological predispositions that might drive individual suicide bombers (Kramer 1990; Merari 1990; Post 1990)…. some analysts see suicide terrorism as fundamentally irrational (Kramer 1990; Merari 1990; Post 1990).

Now Professors Merari and Post, who are in the psychology business, can speak for themselves. But peruse my 1990 article, “The Moral Logic of Hizbullah,” and show me where I even suggest that suicide terrorism is “irrational.” To the contrary: I demonstrate that the method enjoyed such stunning success that leading Shiite clerics were prepared to bend their interpretation of Islamic law to sanction it. As for “irrationality,” in a 1993 article, subtitled “The Calculus of Jihad” (and which Pape didn’t consult) I made my view absolutely clear:

Hizbullah’s collective choices regarding the extent and intensity of its violence had a clear political rationale. Hizbullah was also a political movement, and indeed saw politics as an inseparable part of religion. When it employed violence, it did so for political and not ritualistic purposes—to bring it closer to power. In making its choices, Hizbullah weighed benefits against costs.

Later in Pape’s article, he associates me again with the notion that terrorists are irrational: “Many observers characterize Hamas and [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad as fanatical, irrational groups, extreme both within Palestinian society and among terrorists groups in general (Kramer 1996).” Really? In that 1996 article, I don’t mention Hamas or Islamic Jihad at all.

For years, I (and others) have argued that suicide bombings fit nicely into savvy strategies for terrorist groups, and that their popularity grows when they seem to work. So Pape’s main claim to originality is that he has documented this with empirical evidence.

But reading through Pape’s database of suicide attacks for the place and period I know best—Lebanon in the mid-1980s—I kept encountering operations that I couldn’t remember at all, or that I remembered as having different authors than the ones he names, or that I remembered as having killed far fewer people than appear in his “killed” column. Here are a few glaring discrepancies:

  • Pape’s Campaign 2 (“Hezbollah vs. Israel”), incident no. 2, June 16, 1984, lists a suicide bombing of an Israeli army post that supposedly killed 5. In fact, this was the first suicide bombing conducted by Hizbullah’s rival, the Amal movement, and it didn’t kill anyone. (It’s one of two case studies I treat in an article on the first suicide bombings against Israel in Lebanon. Not in Pape’s bibliography.)
  • Pape’s Campaign 2 (“Hezbollah vs. Israel”), incident no. 3, April 9, 1985, lists a suicide car bombing of an Israeli army post. It did happen, but the bomber was a teenaged woman (pictured below), and she belonged not to Hizbullah but to a pro-Syrian organization (the Syrian Social Nationalist Party). It was the first such bombing ever done by a woman, and it was much-celebrated.
  • Pape’s Campaign 2 (“Hezbollah vs. Israel”), incident no. 6, June 15, 1985, lists a suicide car bombing of an Israeli army post in Beirut that supposedly killed 23. It never happened: by that date, Israel was long gone from Beirut. This would seem to be a confused reference to a suicide car bombing that took place in Beirut the day before, June 14—not against Israelis but against a position of the predominantly Shiite Sixth Brigade of the Lebanese army, then laying siege to Palestinian refugee camps (the so-called “war of the camps”). In other words: a Palestinian suicide bombing against Shiites.
  • Pape’s Campaign 3 (“Hezbollah vs. Israel and South Lebanon Army [SLA]”), incident no. 6, September 3, 1985, lists a suicide car bomb at an SLA outpost that supposedly killed 37—a whopping toll that would have been unforgettable. In fact, the suicide bombing killed only its perpetrator (who was not a member of Hizbullah but belonged to the Lebanese Baath party).
SSNP suicide bomber.

In sum, Robert Pape has not told us much we didn’t know anyway, and his data inspire less confidence than earlier data-based studies. We already knew that suicide bombings were strategic choices. Even in Lebanon, and without the example of the Tamil Tigers, we knew that secular groups could embrace the method with fervor. (In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, pro-Syrian secular groups did three attacks for every one launched by Hizbullah. In Pape’s data, all of these attacks are inexplicably attributed to Hizbullah.) What happened in Lebanon has been repeated in the Palestinian territories, where secular groups have jumped on the bandwagon of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. What begins as a strategic campaign is often driven forward by organizational and Islamist-secular rivalry.

I suppose we should still be grateful to Pape for telling a wider audience the truth—that suicide bombing has a strategic rationale, that it’s being used by more groups because it seems to work, that it’s even superseding other terrorist tactics, and that it’s so appealing in its simplicity and effect that you don’t have to be a religious fanatic to plan one or carry it out. Pape comes closest to an original claim (for academe) in his argument that Yitzhak Rabin, by his words and deeds, gave Hamas and Islamic Jihad every reason to assume that their suicide bombings were working. Pape concludes that small concessions under fire, such as those made by Rabin, just increase the fire—something most Israeli voters concluded a few years ago.

But in his broader policy conclusion, Pape strikes out in an unexpected direction, and on very thin ice. Reading his analysis, you would think that the conclusion would be to raise the costs for terrorist leaders who choose suicide bombings, from Afghanistan to Gaza—to mark such attacks as crimes against humanity and war crimes, to find the masterminds, and to put their heads on pikes for all to see.

Yet Pape does a last-minute twist, arguing that the most effective response would be an American disengagement from the Middle East and Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories. The United States and Israel should stand back and hunker down behind defensive perimeters. Why? This would diminish the incentives (read: grievances) behind strategic suicide bombing. I find this conclusion completely at odds with the analysis. Wouldn’t this be the ultimate concession to the suicide strategy—and be celebrated as such by its planners? Wouldn’t this inspire yet more mutations of the method, and the expansion of the terrorists’ strategic goals? One is left suspecting that Pape’s conclusion has been infected by his loyalties to the Chicago “realists,” a school of political scientists who favor a low-profile posture for the United States in the Middle East (and who also opposed the Iraq war).

In short, Pape has given us a paper of limited originality, based on data that need double-checking, and topped off with conclusions that don’t flow from the findings. It’s more evidence that this kind of work has to be done on an interdisciplinary basis, and in consultation with people who remember.

Update: Over two years after this post, Martin Kramer debated Robert Pape at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on November 8, 2005, by which time Pape had turned his article into a book.

Mixing signals on Hizbullah

On By Martin Kramer

Last week was not a good one for carefully formulated U.S. statements on Hizbullah. Two senior diplomats said things that shouldn’t have been said, suggesting that the U.S. doesn’t quite know where the Iranian-backed movement fits in the “war on terror.”

The first gaffe belonged to U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Vincent Battle. According to the Beirut Daily Star (September 4), Battle was asked about Hizbullah’s attack the previous week on the Shebaa Farms (Har Dov), which killed one Israeli soldier and wounded two others. Was this terrorism? The ambassador said that it did “not fall within the rubric” of terrorism, since Hizbullah had gone after “combatant targets” and not civilians.

Now that may have been the U.S. position when Israel remained in occupation of Lebanon. But it’s the U.S. position, in accord with UN certification, that Israeli troops have withdrawn from Lebanon. Hizbullah’s attacks across the line are violations of it, done by an organization which the U.S. officially designates as terrorist. The U.S. does not regard Israel as intruding on Lebanese sovereignty at the Shebaa Farms, and it has every interest in delegitimizing Hizbullah attacks across the “Blue Line.” Unfortunately, Ambassador Battle has stumbled into according a measure of legitimacy precisely to these attacks. (And it’s an inconsistent position, too: the U.S. regularly categorizes assaults on its own uniformed personnel, from the Marines barracks in Beirut to the U.S.S. Cole and the Pentagon on 9/11, as terrorist acts.) Battle should have answered: “Terrorism is as terrorists do.”

The second mistatement belonged to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in the Q&A following his speech to a U.S. Institute of Peace conference. Armitage, asked whether the U.S. intended to settle scores with Hizbullah over its past attacks on Americans, answered:

Hizbullah may be the A-team of terrorists and maybe al-Qaida is actually the B-team. They’re on the list and their time will come. There is no question about it. They have a blood debt to us, which you spoke to; and we’re not going to forget it and it’s all in good time. We’re going to go after these problems just like a high school wrestler goes after a match: We’re going to take them down one at a time.

Alas, the U.S. has never brought down anyone in Hizbullah, and there is no evidence that it has an operational plan for settling scores left over from the mid-1980s. There is a blood debt, but the bravado should come after action, not before it. A better answer would have been simpler: “We haven’t forgotten, and we haven’t forgiven.”

Perhaps it’s time to get everyone at State on the same page regarding Hizbullah. They are formidable adversaries, and it’s dangerous to make off-the-cuff concessions or threats. Recommended introductory reading: Eyal Zisser, The Return of Hizbullah, in the Fall Middle East Quarterly.