From Max Boot, on terrorist claims that suicide bombings will bring the West to its knees:
Some Western analysts have added to the hype by arguing, in essence, that suicide attacks are a “poor man’s smart bomb” and a tactic against which democratic states have only one recourse: giving in to the bombers’ demands.
Why do conservative writers insist on tossing in little stinkbombs like this when they write op-eds? Obviously, “in essence” is Boot’s way of wriggling out of this if anyone calls him on it, but why bother in the first place? Sure, there’s bound to be someone, somewhere, who vaguely counts as an “analyst” and has said “in essence” that we should cave in to suicide bombers, but you’d have to dig pretty hard to find him. Not giving in to terrorist demands is the closest thing the world has to a consensus view on how to deal with them.
What makes it even weirder is that the rest of the op-ed is pretty reasonable. Boot argues that, in fact, suicide bombing has a lousy record of accomplishing anything, and that’s a good point. “The futility of suicide attacks should not be surprising given that they are the last resort of the weak and desperate,” he says, and he’s right. Why not just stick to that?
