A friend posited this question to me (paraphrased): Are suicide bombings a legitimate means of resistance under the doctrine of flexible response? Would Westerners adopt suicide bombings if placed in the same situation as the residents of occupied territories?
The easy answer is, of course, no. But the benefit of the blogosphere is I get to explicate:
First, let's understand flexible response. Pre-Kennedy, US policy hinged around two philosophies: proportional, or tit-for-tat response, and massive retaliation. Proportional is exactly what it sounds like - if the Soviets supplied arms to the rebels in one of our satellite states, we would do the same to one of their satellite states (this is different from proportionate response, which is the philosophy that the military good of a response must outweigh the cost to innocents of the response, this will come up later). Massive retaliation as a philosophy asserts that certain actions, rather than prompting an equal reaction, trigger a nuclear scenario to end the game. Basically, this draws a line in the sand that asserts activities beyond this line are unacceptable.
Flexible response is an in-between state. It asserts that escalations may be limited in scope, but may be greater than the trigger action; for instance, a bltzkrieg into Western Europe might be met with nukes in Eastern Europe; or the positioning of nuclear missiles in Cuba might result in a blockade of that country, and threats of retaliation elsewhere. Flexible response has two significant benefits. First, by removing the symmetry of response, it makes it more difficult for an aggressor to decide to accept a tradeoff, as the tradeoff may become far worse than they expect. Second, it provides an option short of nuclear armageddon, especially for significant, strategic threats.
Now that we've defined flexible response, let's look at suicide bombers, terrorism, and resistance.
First off, there are a lot of legitimate targets of resistance. Infrastructure. Military personnel. Government agents. I just finished watching V for Vendetta, and it's worth noting that despite the appelation of "terrorist", V targets government buildings, and government agents, not civilians. That's the sign of a good resistance. Flexible response, in the context of a violent resistance, can include many activities. The institution of a curfew might be responded to with attacks on convoys; abduction of tax agents; jamming of government broadcasts. The point of flexible response is not the damage; it is causing the enemy to rethink their plans.
Terrorism is generally not a legitimate form of resistance (some forms of guerilla warfare have the semblance of terrorism; I am not including those). For here, I am asserting that terrorism is attacks whose primary purpose is the death of innocents for the sake of those deaths. These can be morale terrorism, economic terrorism, or support terrorism. Morale terrorism has as its goal breaking the will of the enemy's populace; many of the citywide bombings on both sides of WWII had this goal. Economic terrorism is designed to slow or halt the economy of your target; the attack an tourists at the Cairo museum (September 18, 1997) are a good example; these attacks not only reduced tourism, but helped confine coalition forces participating in the Bright Star exercise on base, and not spending money on the local economy. Support terrorism is the use of terrorist techniques to induce support for your side; punitive attacks against "collaborators" and their families fall into this category.
What are suicide bombings? Functionally, suicide bombings are a form of morale terrorism, with some economic terrorism thrown in. However, from a cost perspective, suicide bombers are not generally effective anymore, as most individual suicide bombers are now captured or killed with minimal impact to their targets; but even when successful, they are a clear case of disproportionate response. Suicide bombers are a two-fold message to the West. On one hand, they are a message from a culture which values its own lives, and its own futures, so little that they will sacrifice their children for the slim chance of harming civilians on the other side. On the other, they are a message that, from the point of view of the resistance, all of their civilians are part of the resistance (Given that apparently 97% of Palestinians support the actions of Hizb'allah, maybe this is a reasonable inference).
This second message is designed to induce the targets to either lose their morale (we can't kill them all!) or become monsters themselves (well, if they're all terrorists, let's just do something about that).
This whole discussion, however, has not yet addressed the root questions: what would Westerners do? First off, Westerners will clearly sacrifice themselves for their causes; Thermopylae, Normandy, Roi Klein, Doolittle's Raiders, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In these cases, either the Westerner has no option but to sell their life dearly (in death ground, fight), or believe that, if luck and God are with them, they'll survive (it's like the lottery), or is acting to immediately save someone else's life. These are sacrifice, not suicide. True martyrdom - like that of Rabbi Akiva, Jesus of Nazareth, the man in Tianenman Square - is the willingness to force someone else to kill you for your beliefs, rather than renounce your beliefs (the Islamic view of martyrdom isn't; dying for your cause isn't martyrdom, it's poor strategy).
The difference is that Westerners fight for something, not against something. The War on Terror, or War against Islamic Fascism, is really a War for Freedom and Liberty. From a game theory perspective, our first goal is that the world doesn't lose, then that we don't lose, then that we win. Islamic Fascism, however, has a different set of goals: the first goal is that the other side loses. That's the difference. Westerners wouldn't resort to suicide bombings because that's a losing strategy. What would Westerners do?
Well, first off, ignore Israel. Israel would be happy to ignore the Palestinians, if the Palestinians would stop attacking them; in this case, the attacks are the action, not the reaction. But let's hypothesis a fascist Caliphate which has occupied America. What should the response be? Attacks on the religious police. Abduction of government officials. Sabotage of infrastructure.
But strapping a bomb to the waist of your daughter, and sending her to blow up other schoolchildren? Never.
