Stimulus -- Response

Steve Niva has a pretty fascinating article up at CounterPunch explaining the rise of the female suicide bomber in Iraq. What makes it fascinating is Niva's position that the change has nothing to do with gender politics of women in Muslim countries or the supposition that the surge is making it harder to carry bigger bombs (as we've been told by the media on a number of occasions) and everything to do with the fact it's a relatively intelligent tactical shift on the part of the insurgency.

The escalation in female suicide bombings across Iraq has led to a flurry of media efforts to identify a specifically gender-based motivation for this increase, resulting in a bewildering array of psychological and cultural explanations about what is allegedly driving the "mind of the female bomber." The rise in Iraqi female bombers, we have been told, is the result of depression, despair, revenge, cultural subordination to men, sexual abuse, and a host of other factors largely attributed to their gender. For example, a long New York Times article alleged that most female suicide bombers suffer from depression or a lack of purpose in the wake of a male family member's loss, whether due to death or detention by the U.S. military. The article also referred to the influence of "oriental culture" and sexual abuse on women's choices, suggesting that the subordinate role of Sunni women in rural, conservative families is what drew them to undertake suicide attacks.

The relentless search for a gender-based explanation to account for the increase in Iraqi female bombers, however, is fatally flawed for two important reasons.

In the first place, the journalistic search for a gender-based motivation for Iraqi female suicide bombers has done little more than illustrate that there is simply no single demographic or psychological profile for them. According to various accounts, some are single and some are married, and while some have expressed depression over lost loved ones or relatives, others have simply expressed a desire for revenge, and still others have expressed strong nationalist or religious reasons for taking such desperate actions against a foreign occupier.

Such diverse motivations among Iraqi female bombers affirm the growing consensus among scholars of suicide bombings more generally that there is simply no single profile for suicide bombers of any gender, except for the fact that suicide bombings are largely undertaken in a context of foreign military occupation, where the primary individual motivation for both men and women is opposition to occupation combined with a variety of personal grievances. While pointing out that "95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against occupying forces," one student of female suicide bombings, Lindsey O'Rourke, concluded in a largely corrective op-ed in the New York Times that "the main motives and circumstances that drive female suicide attackers are quite similar to those that drive men."

But secondly, and more importantly, the search a gender-based motivation for female suicide bombers ultimately tells us very little about why there has been such a dramatic upsurge in Iraqi women committing suicide bombings now, and only since the U.S. military adopted its "surge" strategy in 2007. The question of timing and context is paramount. It is highly doubtful that Iraqi women only began confronting depression or despair over lost family members, let alone conservative cultural norms, after 2007.

Maybe if we got out of Iraq, there would be fewer suicide bombers in Iraq? Just saying.