Welcome to World War III
By Robert Rosenberg

Woman crucified paintings 20x30cm, mixed media on recycled paper, by Silvia Rosenberg

Suicide bombing is the weapon of choice in what has turned into World War III, and wherever you are, it’s coming to a neighborhood near you. It’s as old as Samson pulling down the pillars on the Philistines, and emerged in the early 1980s as a strategic weapon for the Lebanese Hezbollah, which used it to force American and French troops out of Lebanon. Since then it has been copied by Palestinian, Kashmiri, Chechen, Turk, and Tamil terrorists, used in places as far flung as Argentina and Tanzania, Kenya and Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, India, Spain and of course, in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, or as the Americans call it, nine eleven (9/11).

As a strategic weapon, suicide bombers are smarter than any "smart bomb.’ Unlike cruise missiles, suicide bombs can change course and target on the fly, because a suicide bomber with a cause, whether religious or nationalist, has only one real goal: killing as many of their enemy, civilians or soldiers, as they can. If there’s no crowd at the entrance to the mall, they can go to the bus stop, and if the bus stop is empty, there’s always the pizza joint next door.

Some rescue workers who go to work immediately after a bombing, say the most horrifying sight at the scene is not the blasted flesh and blood of the innocents but the serenely smiling face on the killer’s head, which often survives the blast intact. Heads have landed upright on the street and flown through shop windows. In the last suicide bombing in Israel of 2003, the head of a bomber who struck at a bus stop just past a highway over-pass, flew into the air, and then crashed through the windshield of a car on the overpass, landing on the passenger seat of the car. The shocked driver panicked and crashed his car, starting a pileup that briefly made police believe that a second bomber had struck on the overpass.

The bombs are usually home-made, distilled from fertilizers and detergents. But for their real efficacy, the bombs are packed with nuts and nails, screws, bolts and ball bearings. That shrapnel is what causes the most damage – ripping and tearing flesh, and smashing bone. Israeli hospitals have become the most professional in the world for dealing with such trauma.

Of the nearly 1,000 Israelis killed since the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in the fall of 2000 to the end of 2003, more than 750 were killed by suicide bombings, and nearly ten times that number were wounded in bombings that have taken place in malls, restaurants, buses, cafes or simply a crowded mid-town sidewalk in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. More than 75 percent of the attacks were conducted by pedestrians, meaning the bomb was worn on their body. But truck and car bombs, driven by people ready to give up their lives have been used in Africa and Asia, Iraq and Turkey.

The size of a bomb is important of course, and so are the confines of the space where the bomb goes off. But more important is how deep inside the crowd the bomber can get so the shrapnel spreads through as many people as possible. That’s why some of the most successful bombers have been those dressed as the people who live in the neighborhood where they struck, getting on a bus dressed like a soldier or a religious man, or a teen with dyed hair barging his way into a discotheque or pizza joint. The idea is to be amidst the enemy. And that’s why security requires so many perimeters around potential targets and yet nothing can really be done to stop a suicide terrorist once they have penetrated the perimeters. Even if the last line of defense, human guards who earns little more than minimum wage to stand with a magnometer wand outside a restaurant or a mall, spots the suicide terrorist in time to prevent it, what can they really do? And are they ready to give up their lives?

They can try shooting – if they have a gun and know how to use it, and most importantly, are certain that they are facing a suicide bomber. But what if they have made a mistake and shoot an innocent person by mistake? In fact, while many of the guards outside Israeli restaurants and malls do wear guns, none have ever fired at a suspected suicide bomber.

If they don’t have a gun, but do manage to spot a suspected bomber before the bomber realizes he or she has been noticed, at most, say police experts, the guard can try to grab the bomber’s hands, to prevent the killer’s fingers from reaching the simple button that ignites the bomb. But that’s also no guarantee of anything, since the bomb could just as easily be set off by a remote control phone call to the device from anywhere in the country, indeed the world. Nonetheless, there have been a handful of cases in which a guard has rebuffed a bomber at the door to a crowded restaurant, and surprisingly, the bomber moved on. In one case, in Jerusalem, the bomber struck at the next door café. In another, the surprised guard ran after the suspected bomber on the Tel Aviv seaside boardwalk, shouting that he was a suspect. Israeli security guards posted outside the nearby U.S. embassy leapt into the chase and the bomber was wrestled to the ground, disarmed and arrested. He’d later say at his trial, trying to evade a life sentence imposed by a Tel Aviv District Court that judged him guilty of attempted murder, that after doorman-guard at the café barred his way, he decided against going ahead with his mission.

There is no single, comprehensive technology or even a line of defense against terrorism. It’s generally agreed that sensors to detect explosives would be very useful and there are some already capable of detecting chemical combinations of some known explosives. But each type of bomb, practically each mixture of explosive, requires a different sensor – and what about sensors for chemical or biological weapons? How many sensors will be needed – and where will they go? At the entrance to transportation stations – railroads and undergrounds, subways and metros -- or in every building with more than 500 occupants, or 5,000 or 50,000 ? Which buildings are most likely targets? Movie theaters? Office towers? What about technology on buses, one of the most popular targets of suicide bombers? The questions being asked by security experts are practically philosophical – and nobody can claim to have all the answers. Not only is it scientifically ambitious to come up with the range of sensors required to begin to effectively safeguard a facility of any sort, the logistics of effective deployment, let alone the costs, would be just as daunting.

That doesn’t mean nobody is trying. Since 9/11, the U.S. Defense Department and Homeland Security Department have earmarked some $40 billion for counter-terrorism technology development – the CIA even established a venture capital fund -- In-Q-Tel -- with a mandate to invest in technology startups working on cutting edge technology that could be effectively used in counter-terrorism. According to GocExec.com, a daily news publication on the business activities of the federal government, the venture fund has reviewed more than 4,000 business plans and has delivered more than 60 technologies to the government. In-Q-Tel has more than 40 companies currently in the In-Q-Tel portfolio, the company spokeswoman told the online magazine.

The race for new technologies has yielded some extraordinarily creative efforts, like explosive-sensing devices. There are even experiments underway to use pigs as sniffers for explosives. If they can find truffles, the exquisite mushrooms appreciated by gourmands, why not the chemicals used to make bombs? An Israeli farmer is working on training pigs for just that purpose, but ironically, because of the religious dietary laws of both Judaism and Islam, neither the Israeli police nor army has been allowed to try out the animals.

Technologies might be important, but for years, the professionals in counter-terrorism around the world tried to persuade politicians and security bureaucracies to cooperate. Locally, the old adage, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter does apply, but as the world shrinks because of globalization, terror also becomes global, requiring extensive cross-border cooperation. But the politicians, generals and spymasters all had reasons to keep their cards close to their chests, protecting their turf while paying lip service to international cooperation.

And often, say experts in Britain, Israel and Sri Lanka, when they approached allies for cooperation, "the response was, "your terror is your problem, not ours,’" says a former intelligence officer for a Western power now working in the private sector. "It took 9/11 for cooperation, genuine cooperation, to begin," he adds, "but even now, it’s still not complete cooperation. In fact, it’s far from it," he warns. "The Americans still believe they know best, the French always have their own way to do things, the Israelis are suspicious of everyone, Turks don’t trust Greeks or Russians, and of course, since 9/11 the West in general now has a problem trusting Arabs."

The British, he points out, generally do not share counter remote-control bomb technologies for dealing with the IRA because they fear the U.S. military, law enforcement and private security companies are vulnerable to infiltration by American supporters of the IRA. Since the Jonathan Pollard affair of the mid-1980s, when a junior U.S. naval intelligence officers was caught spying for Israel, the Americans, despite all their support for Israel, don’t trust implicitly Israelis. And the two countries with the most experience with suicide terror, Israel and Sri Lanka, hardly cooperate. Ironically, the Muslim lobby in Sri Lanka insisted on breaking Israeli-Sri Lankan ties that had included Israeli training of Sri Lankan counter-terror units, even though Muslims are among the targets of the LTTE, the independence-seeking Tamil Tigers, who have used suicide bombings very effectively, assassinating senior political and military leaders.

Yet cooperation does exist. Almost every week, the Israel National Police Force, possibly the most experienced police force in the world for dealing with suicide bombings, hosts a visiting delegation of foreign law enforcement and security personnel wanting to know how to prepare for suicide bombings. Delegations come from the city, state, and national level from the U.S., Europe and Asia.

The Israelis make several points about how to protect against suicide bombings – and one of the first points is that the initiative is in the hands of the terrorists, and even if information is flowing, it is difficult to eliminate the threat. Nonetheless there are countermeasures, starting with understanding that terrorists rely on infrastructures, which have logistical footprints. For example, businesses that manufacture or sell the materials that can be used for bomb-making should be alerted to that – and be ready to alert the authorities when, for example, unusually large purchases of those materials are acquired. Targets proven to be attractive to bombers should be designed so they are not turned into shrapnel when they are blasted by a bomb. Obviously, intelligence is needed from the communities where terrorism emerges and where it is sheltered by sympathizers.

And once a terrorist strikes, the Israeli experts tell their guests, emergency rescue and investigative efforts on the scene must all be integrated – with one command on the scene, making sure of two things: that the wounded get to hospital and that the evidence is collected as quickly as possible to help the counter-terrorist investigators identify the type of bomb and the bomber, to enable them to pursue the cell behind the bombing and thus prevent another one.

The veteran counter-terror expert says the progress being made now because of international cooperation has made it more difficult for terrorists than it was before 9/11 – not so much because of super new technology or counter-terror tactics, but simply because people are alert, countries are alert. "And that’s good," he says. "But that very progress means that we have to anticipate an escalation."

While 2004 opened with a high alert in the U.S. starting right after Thanksgiving of 2003 and going through the first couple of weeks of January this year, as U.S. and European security officials determined that the Christmas holiday season would attractive to al Qaida as a time to strike, the year 2004 has two main events that are particularly enticing to terrorists, say the experts: The Athens Olympics and the American elections.

In Greece, some 650 million euros are being spent by the Greek government for Olypics security. A seven-nation committee -- the United States, Britain, Israel, France, Germany, Australia and Spain are assisting Greece, with Israel providing the key help on preventing suicide bombings, Greek Public Order Minister George Floridis said early this year. The U.S. wants to bring its own security to the Olympics, as does Israel -- and if they are allowed to do so by a special Greek parliamentary bill yet to be passed, Greece faces the problem of many countries insisting on their own security. Greek law so far forbids foreign security guards from carrying weapons during the Olympics. Since 1972, when armed Palestinians hijacked 11 members of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics, countries have been including discreet security of their own at Olympics Games, adding security officers as team officials. But 9/11 raised the stakes and profile of security. Greece is preparing an overall security force of some 45,000 for the Games -- three times the number used at the last summer Olympics, in Sydney 2000, just before 9/11. Yet Israeli security experts who have been visiting Greece ahead of the games to examine security, are coming away troubled by the enormity of the security problems for the Games. The problem, said one, is not simply protecting sporting venues – the security at airports, train and metro stations will be nearly impossible, short of filling every possible target with troops.

The American political conventions in the summer of 2004 are no less a major headache, but will obviously be heavily protected. More worrying to the experts is a coordinated attack, said a veteran Shin Bet officer now in the private sector and working in the U.S. as a security consultant, "the U.S. is simply not capable of coping with six or seven malls across the country being hit at the same time by suicide bombers, or even if one mall is attacked by several bombers."

Responses to suicide terrorism differ from country to country, culture to culture, and that also precludes the kind of full-scale cooperation necessary. According to a veteran trainer of counter-terrorism operatives in the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, Israel’s counter-terror and counter-intelligence service, the Americans are still far adopting the mindset necessary to deal with suicide terrorism on American soil.

Jean Lasar, who spent 30 years training soldiers, police and spies, has lately been working in the private sector, most recently for International Security and Defense Systems, an Israeli company working with Smith and Wesson to offer basic training sessions for U.S. security personnel from both the public and private sector. Emphasizing that the 25-hour sessions ISDS and Smith and Wesson offer are not full-scale courses but rather an introduction to the security problems posed by suicide bombing, Lasar says the Americans face a particularly difficult paradox when trying to learn how to cope with suicide terror.

"When I explained to a group of U.S. police from local and state levels that the scene of a terrorist bombing in Israel is usually cleaned up within a few hours, the officers were incredulous," says Lasar. "’But forensics has so much work to do on the scene, they complained.’ That’s when I realized what the problem is for the Americans. They approach the scene of a terrorist attack with an investigative-prosecutorial attitude, collecting evidence for a trial some time in the future. Our attitude is that we need the forensics as fast as possible so we can run to prevent the next bombing," he says.

Furthermore, if the most important counter-terrorism strategy is to not let the terrorists disrupt normal life for the public, "the last thing we can do in Israel," says Lasar, "is leave blown-up buses on the streets for days to let lab technicians scour the scene for one more bit of evidence for a trial that might never happen, since the bomber is dead. The goal in fighting terror is to keep life as normal as possible for the citizenry. It’s normal for them to worry about the law. For us it’s normal to worry about the next bomb." Lasar and others say that Americans, and Europeans, will eventually have to come to grips with the balance between "protection of civil rights and protecting the civilian right to life."

The research, often based on interviews with suicide bombers or accomplices captured before they could accomplish their mission, shows that it is increasingly difficult to predict who will turn themselves into suicide killer with a cause. Currently they are mostly Muslim – but not all are religious and many of the suicide attackers are motivated by nationalism. There is growing concern that extremists from causes neither nationalist nor religious could turn to suicide attack missions. Extreme conservationists, for example might decide to launch a willing suicide bomber against the corporate headquarters of an oil company that does particularly gross damage to wildlife in a spill. An African angry enough about how AIDS was allowed to spread through that continent because of greed, might decide to make an ultimate sacrifice while taking revenge on a pharmaceutical company’s workers in some European city. Those kinds of scenarios are not impossible, warn some counter-terror experts, who say that it would be foolish to assume that only Muslims are capable of suicide terrorism.

Obviously, "the swamps that breed the hatred and despair have to be dried up,’ as so many politicians say, because it is true that at the local level, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. But even if the Palestinians, Chechens, Tamils, or "Islamicidists" of al Qaida get everything they want, it won’t stop the people who don’t have cruise missiles from using people who can be used as cruise missiles against those who do have them. Terrorism is not the ideology; it’s the means and instrument of war in the 21st century, the tactic and strategy for anyone out to challenge establishments.

While it is convenient to believe that it’s faith in virgins waiting in heaven that puts that smile on the face of the bomber, the next bomber to strike could be on a mission to make governments do something about global warming or nano-biotechnology or even more obscure causes taken up with religious fervor and with enough supporters to give the bomber reason to believe they will be remembered with love and admiration by their camp.

Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t is the first lesson of counter-terrorism. Despite the image of the bomber as poor and uneducated religious fanatics, desperate and with nothing to lose, studies show most bombers are educated, often from the middle class and not particularly poor or destitute. Some come from wealthy homes. Almost all Muslim suicide terrorists are men, but women are making progress in at least Palestinian Islamic society – one of the first suicide bombers of 2004 to kill Israelis was a woman, the seventh woman since the intifada began.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of Hamas, told TV cameras with a smile "we have women fighters." A few weeks later, Israel assassinated him from the air. The mother of two said she had a metal plate in her leg that would set off the metal detector, when she reached the soldiers at the Erez border crossing from Gaza to Israel. The crossing was outfitted only the week before with up to date bar code equipment to make the process of getting through the crossing much faster for thousands of Palestinians who go through to jobs in Israel. The soldiers directed her to a waiting room and called for a female soldier to frisk the woman. The woman blew her self up in the waiting room, destroying the new X-Ray machines and electronic card code scanners for the IDs carried by the workers.

Ehud Yaari, a longtime Arab affairs watcher for Iraeli media, called the Hamas use of a woman bomber, "a watershed.’ On the air the night of the Jauaary 14 bombing, he promoted a theory that said there was "an element of eroticism in the way the female bombers are described preparing for their missions. In the fatwa, the religious commandment the issued by some Islamic clergy approving of women bombers, they care called "brides’ for previous male bombers. Just as the male bombers are promised the perpetual virgins awaiting them in heaven, so the female bombers are promised a husband in the form of a previous martyr (which just goes to show that even in heaven, Muslim men insist on rights – polygamy – they deny their women).

The families of the suicide attackers almost never know their son or father, husband or brother – and lately sisters, wives and daughters – are going to do it. But in Israel and Palestine, they know the Israelis will come and blow up their home after their son or brother, husband or lately wife, have blown up Israelis at a bus stop or mall. That doesn’t matter, say the relatives of the bombers, greeting visitors to the mourning tents where they hand out candy, celebrating their loved one’s the ascent to heaven. If they are believers they know that by virtue of giving up their martyr, the family is also guaranteed a place in heaven.

In any case, charity will step in to help them in this life, they know. Saddam Hussein used to send $25,000 a bomber, right up until the Americans invaded Iraq. They get their pictures in the newspaper, maybe a meeting with Yasser Arafat, and in their neighborhoods they’re celebrities as parents of the bomber, who gets his few minutes of global fame. Sometimes even sooner than CNN is carrying the live footage from the scene of destruction, the martyr’s face appears on posters on the walls of the refugee camps and in the cities. Becoming a suicide bomber is the highest form of resistance – to Israeli occupation, to American imperialism in Iraq, to the West’s evil ways of promiscuity, drink, and disrespect for elders and parents.

Many volunteer, but few are accepted, only those with the right combination of devotion and willingness, utter lack of skepticism and yet savvy enough to draw the ideological dots once they are laid out by the indoctrinating conductor of the cell. They are found in universities and mosques, but also in the neighborhood gangs that rule the narrow warrens of the refugee camps. There was a football team in Hebron that sprouted several bombers. Once brought into the cell – secrecy is a great part of the allure and mystique, of course -- they are surrounded by admiring handlers, who provide religious indoctrination, promising the virgins, and relief from the tribulations of this world. They record living will last testaments on videotape for the world and their families -- even if there’s only one TV in their entire neighborhood.

Thus, ultimately, the real battlefield in World War III, is neither the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan nor the sidewalks of Tel Aviv, London, New York or Rome. It is the glass screen box that has become so ubiquitous around the world, the TV.

For while the bomber is taking revenge with a smile, the people who sent the bombers are already preparing copies of the videotape to give to the news networks, or having their makeup applied before their own TV appearances to explain that the bomber nobly sacrificed their own life for their people, their cause, their God. And therefore, just as TV is not going to disappear, neither will terror nor its most awful form – the suicide bomber strolling down the street looking for a target.

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation