Angry in the Great White North

Clark McCauley, a Bryn Mawr College psychology professor and part of a team consulting the Department of Homeland Security, said exactly that:

McCauley even finds insight into the terrorist mind from, of all sources, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. He points to a passage from Lincoln's speech on giving up one's life for a cause: "From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."

It is part of McCauley's argument that suicide bombers see themselves like the dead of Gettysburg -- sacrificing their lives for a greater good to ensure, in Lincoln's words, "that we, here, resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."

I'd like to know what evidence he has for that. That is, I doubt that the suicide bomber was thinking of Honest Abe when he drove his car bomb into a crowd of children in order to kill one American soldier.

To me this statement says more about McCauley than it does about suicide bombers. Is he one of Michael Moore's "Minuteman" crowd, seeing suicide bombers as freedom fighters? Is it McCauley who sees them in terms of the soldiers Lincoln was praising?

Haven't heard anyone else make that comparison. Just McCauley.

There is an attempt to fix this:

That is McCauley's point about Lincoln. Obviously, Lincoln was not calling for suicide attacks, but he was trying to mobilize the troops to fight harder to honor those who had died already.

But that is the difference, isn't it. Lincoln isn't praising an individual who strapped on a bomb, avoided armed police and security and anyone else who could actually fight, then in civilian dress got in close to a pizza shop and detonated the bomb, trying to take out as many women and children as possible.

Lincoln was extorting those who, in uniform and in formation on the battlefield, faced the withering wall of massed fire while closing in with enemy troops, using the tactics of the day, forced on them by the limitations of the range and accuracy of the weapons on the day. That soldier didn't intend to die that day, or any day. Indeed, dying meant not fighting another day, or returning home to family and friends once peace was won, and that would be a failure of sorts.

Maybe I'm not a psychologist, but I can't see how the two thought processes are anything similar. It worries me that there are people like McCauley who think they are. In fact, in a paper, McCauley argues further that it doesn't make sense for suicide bombers to be crazy:

Another way to think about this issue is to imagine yourself a terrorist, living an underground existence cut off from all but the few who share your goals. Your life depends on the others in your group. Would you want someone in your group suffering from some kind of psychopathology? Someone who cannot be depended on, someone out of touch with reality? Of course there are occasional lone bombers or lone gunmen who kill for political causes, and such individuals may indeed suffer from some form of psychopathology. But terrorists in groups, especially groups that can organize attacks that are successful, are likely to be within the normal range of personality.

He sees the US response as unreasonable (though I haven't heard of any more 9/11's since 9/11):

The domestic costs of increased security are the costs of a more centralized state that can become the enemy of its own people. In the U.S., the government has already assumed new powers without consulting Congress. Polls taken in years preceding the terrorist attack on 11 September indicate that about half of adult Americans saw the federal government as a threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans. No doubt fewer would say so in the aftermath of the recent attacks, a shift consistent with the adage that "war is the health of the state." But if more security could ensure the safety of the nation, the Soviet Union would still be with us.

So now the US government is the enemy. And didn't the Soviet Union fall in no small part because Ronald Reagan took them on in an arms race, forcing Gorbachev to try and negotiate an end to it before it bankrupted the USSR, trying to paint the Soviet Union as less of a threat by introducing limited freedoms, which spiraled out of control, and destroyed the country from the inside?

Seems to me to be an argument for a strong military and for pushing hard for democracy and freedom, especially in those places where institutionalized terror thrives, like the Middle East. Isn't that what the whole Iraq thing is about?

He concludes:

The response to terrorism can be more dangerous than the terrorists. Relaxing into the warmth of anger and war against terrorism will not honor those who died in the attacks of 9/11. We have to think.

Who's relaxing? Who's seriously think the administration hasn't given this a great deal of thought?

When it comes to sheer anger, that seems to be the left's specialty.

But apparently he makes sense to some people:

Professor of Psychology Clark R. McCauley has been named one of three co-directors of the new Homeland Security National Center for Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (NC-START). The center, which will be directed by Professor of Criminology Gary LaFree at the University of Maryland, is one of four such centers created by the Department of Homeland Security; each center assembles a multidisciplinary team of scholars to examine a cluster of critical homeland-security issues.

Maybe I'm just not getting what he's trying to say. Wouldn't be the first time.