Anti-Climacus

WELL: I knew there was something I wanted to add to this on Palestinian suicide bombing. Here goes:

There seem to be two main approaches to this problem: the leftist one emphasizes 'root causes' of poverty and oppression, and suggests that the individual and the collective are acting out of a sense of desperation and rage against their oppressors. Their behavior can be changed, then, only by changing the root causes. The rightist view is approximately that certain subsets of this population have accepted an ideology along the lines of 'you love life, we love death.' Consequently, there is no room for dealing with them.

But it seems like there might be a third way. Assume that potential Palestinian terrorists are grouped together for non-trivial reasons*, and that these groups have hierarchical structures where the leaders of said groups have strong incentives to make acceptable deals that pop up**. You'd expect, rationally, that the success of suicide bombings in garnering political concessions would lead to the long-term decrease in suicide bombing as a method (because if the other side is willing to sit down with you at a table and talk about terms, the marginal benefit of another bombing versus another meeting looks less appealing); you'd also expect, maybe more unexpectedly, that the failure of suicide bombing to generate concessions would lead to a decrease in future bombings (because there's no point, after it's been established that the method doesn't work, to continue it, as it has unusually high costs as a method).

The only case in which you'd expect to see bombings continue is when it's not really clear what the response is. If you're getting mixed signals from the other guy, you want to continue to bomb (just in case that's what's producing the moments of concession), but you don't want to bomb too much (in case the bombing is what is making them pull back from offering concessions). This seems to be approximately the case with the Palestinians-Israelis--where they are on 'peace' at any moment is hard to tell unless you closely follow the Jerusalem Post, and even then it's quite easy to become confused. It also strikes me that if this explanation is correct, you'd expect to see it in other situations with terrorist groups which make political claims (northern Ireland leaps to mind as a possible confirming case, but I haven't worked through it yet).

*That is to say, I'm assuming at least the leaders of various Palestinian terrorist groups to be rational and have at least some political aims, however vaguely defined. If these are true, I think it follows that you have to be at least in theory open to treating them as rational actors.

**same general assumption as above