Likelihood of Success

Muslims stop reading the papers

Jul 24, 2007 Orient, Stragety

No Israeli believes Muslims are stupid. But the myth of an endless appetite for reckless suicide bombing, regardless of its tactical inefficacy, lives on in the West. Are Muslims getting tired of the self-inflicted bloodshed, though?

It hardly seems conceivable. The left promised us that anything short of asking, “Please sir, may I have another?” after 9/11 would result in non-stop terrorist attacks in the U.S., and was wrong. The same people has guaranteed us that the “desperate” and “motivated” Muslim “insurgent” would never tire of blowing himself up until the Great Satan quit the field in the Mideast. We were told that this trend would only continue the more intensively we brought the battle to the bad guys. The harder we pressed these diamonds of humanity, we were told, the harder they got, and the brighter shone their hero, Osama bin-Laden.

So what are we to make of this?:

Muslims around the world increasingly reject suicide bombings and other violence against civilians in defense of Islam, according to a new international poll dealing with how the world’s population judges their lives, countries and national institutions.A wide ranging survey of international attitudes in 47 countries by the Pew Research Center also reported that in many of the countries where support for suicide attacks has declined, there has also has been decreasing support for al-Qaida leader Osama bin-Laden.

This is great news, right? Fewer suicide bombings (except the really good kind) is good for everyone. Of course, Bin-Laden’s lack of popularity may be connected to the fact that he’s completely dead. Even in Iraq, the bombing is growing old, as this post linked to by Instapundit today makes clear:

U.S. tactics and training have made enemy efforts much less lethal. This has helped demoralize an increasing number of terrorists. Many are tired of killing Iraqi civilians, and the increasing difficulty at getting at American troops. … This has been going on for years, and an increasing number of Iraqi fighters are demoralized and quitting. Many either become informers, or surrender and speak freely.

Muslims are not stupid. They invented numbers, after all. Suicide bombings are simply a diminishing-returns proposition. Why didn’t someone tell those who were so gloriously blowing up buses and pizza shops five years ago that diminishing returns, high concrete walls and the suboptimal tactic of intending to die might not make them the vanguard of social change the papers said they would be? And will they do so now?

Of course not. It flies in the face of the antiwar mantra. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, much less the West Bank wall and the present troop surge in Iraq, were supposed to only enrage, forever, the people of the rage, who the media told us was infinitely capable of self-destructive behavior. Indeed, celebration of this bloodlust by the media was a factor in all this senseless murder. I wonder if its perpetrators, and the culture that bought into this myth, will ask Reuters, the BBC, the Associated Press the New York Times and the rest for their money, and their wasted blood, back.

It’s not over, of course. Suicide murder has not stopped. It is still not a good situation if only one percent of a billion people are prepared to blow themselves up as long as they take a piece of you, too; and we’re still way above one percent.

But this trend certainly seems contrary to what we were promised by the policy experts, the mainstream press, and the political left. Now what? Well, they can count on the Democrats in the Congress, for whom our enemies (whether it is the USSR or Al Qaeda) are always winning and it is always hopeless for democracy to fight back. That works fine when “winning” (other than winning political power) is not your goal anyway.

UPDATE: More analysis from Hot Air.