The assassins who queue up to die

By ROBERT FISK

Not long before the Second World War, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin argued that "the bomber will always get through."

Today, we can argue that the suicide bomber will always get through. Maybe not all of them - we may never know how many other hijackers failed to board domestic flights in the United States - but enough to produce carnage on an awesome scale. Yet still we have not begun to address this phenomenon.

The suicide bomber is here to stay. It is an exclusive weapon - it belongs to 'them' not us - and no military power appears able to deal with it.

Partly because of the suicide bomber, the Israelis fled Lebanon. Specifically because of a suicide bomber, the Americans fled Lebanon 17 years earlier. I still remember Vice-President George Bush - now George Bush sen - visibly moved amid the ruins of the US Marine base in Beirut, where 241 American servicemen had just been slaughtered. "We are not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards shake the foreign policy of the US," he told us. "Foreign policy is not going to be dictated or changed by terror.

Then a few months later, the Marines ran away from Lebanon, 'redeployed' to their ships off shore.

Not long ago, I was chatting to an Indian soldier, a veteran of New Delhi's involvement in the Sri Lanka war who was now serving with the United Nations in Southern Lebanon. How did the Tamil suicide bombers compare those of the Lebanese Hizbollah I asked him? The soldier raised his eyebrows. "The Hizbollah has nothing on those guys. Just think, they all carry a suicide capsule. I told my soldiers to drive at 100 miles an hour on the roads of Sri Lanka in case one of them hurled himself into the jeep."

But there is no military answer to this. As long as 'our' side will risk but not give its life the suicide bomber is the other side's nuclear weapon. That desperate, pitiful phone call from the passenger on her way to her doom in the Boeing 767 crash on the Pentagon told her husband that the hijackers held knives and box-cutters. Knives and box-cutters - that's all you need now to inflict a crashing physical defeat on a superpower. That and a plane with a fuel load.

But the suicider does not conform to a set of identical characteristics. Many of the callow Palestinian youths blowing themselves to bits - and more often than not, the most innocent of Israelis - have little or no, formal education. They have a poor knowledge of the Koran but a powerful sense of fury, despair and self-righteousness to propel them. The Hizbollah suiciders were more deeply versed in the Koran, older, often with years of imprisonment to steel them in the hours before their immolation.

This week's suiciders created a precedent. If there were at least four on each aircraft, this means that 16 men decided to kill themselves at the same time. Did they all know each other? or did one of them know all the rest? For sure, they were educated. If the Boeing which hit the Pentagon was being flown by men with knives - and thus presumably, the other three aircraft were too - then these were suiciders with a good working knowledge of the fly-by-wire instrument panel of one of the world's most sophisticated aircraft.

These men must have travelled the same scheduled flights many times before. They would have to do that - to check the x-ray security apparatus as the airports. How many crew, the average passenger manifest, the average delays on departure times. They needed to see if the cabin crew locked the flight deck door - in my experience travelling on US domestic flights, all too rarely. Savage, cruel these men were but also, it seems, educated.

- INDEPENDENT

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