Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  ultimately threw its weight: Ibid.; Ali Khedery, “Why We Stuck with Maliki—and Lost Iraq,” Washington Post, July 3, 2014.

  a devout Shia who had spent: Steven R. Hurst, “Analysis: Iraq PM’s Silence Telling,” Washington Post, January 12, 2007; Filkins, “What We Left Behind.”

  Maliki’s grandfather was: Filkins, “What We Left Behind.”

  sentenced to death: Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 147.

  “arrested everyone who”: Filkins, “What We Left Behind.”

  excluding, detaining, persecuting: Abigail Hauslohner, “In Baghdad, Middle-Class Sunnis Say They Prefer Militants to Maliki,” Washington Post, July 12, 2014; Priyanka Boghani, “In Their Own Words: Sunnis on Their Treatment in Maliki’s Iraq,” Frontline, October 28, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/rise-of-isis/in-their-own-words-sunnis-on-their-treatment-in-malikis-iraq.

  He forced Sunnis: Sky, The Unraveling, 360; Boghani, “In Their Own Words.”

  “ensuring a strong”: Sky, The Unraveling, 360.

  were terrorizing Sunnis: Mohamad Bazzi, “How Saddam Hussein’s Execution Contributed to the Rise of Sectarianism in the Middle East,” Nation, January 15, 2016.

  Maliki was a puppet: Steven R. Hurst, “Iraqi Sunni Claims ‘Genocide Campaign,’” Washington Post, August 13, 2007. According to Kenneth M. Pollack, “It cannot be said often enough that Maliki himself is NOT an Iranian puppet. He dislikes and distrusts the Iranians, and sees himself as a nationalist who would like to free Iraq from Iran’s clutches.” Kenneth M. Pollack, “Iraqi Elections, Iranian Interests,” Markaz, Brookings Institution, April 4, 2014, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2014/04/04/iraqi-elections-iranian-interests.

  A fantasy caliphate: Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel, “Why Jihadists Write Poetry,” New Yorker, June 8, 2015.

  An al-Qaeda offshoot: Tim Lister, “How ISIS Is Overshadowing al Qaeda,” CNN, June 30, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/30/world/meast/isis-overshadows-al-qaeda/index.html.

  Sunnis who feel shut out: William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 10, 157; Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 20, 29–31, 44–45; Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), xvi, 164.

  killing Shia “apostates”: Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” Atlantic, March 2015; see also Stern and Berger, ISIS, 16.

  “Shiites should be executed.” Bin Laden’s mother: Mary Anne Weaver, “The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Atlantic, June 8, 2006; Weiss and Hassan, ISIS, 11–12; Stern and Berger, ISIS, 16.

  they often fear and hate: See, e.g., Tim Arango, “Iraqis Who Fled Mosul Say They Prefer Militants to Government,” New York Times, June 12, 2014; Nour Malas and Ghassan Adnan, “Sunni Tribes in Iraq Divided Over Battle Against Islamic State,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2015.

  Even affluent, well-educated: Hauslohner, “In Baghdad, Middle-Class Sunnis Say They Prefer Militants to Maliki.”

  forced out in 2014: Martin Chulov, Luke Harding, and Dan Roberts, “Nouri al-Maliki Forced from Post as Iraq’s Political Turmoil Deepens,” Guardian, August 12, 2014.

  “Mr. Maliki is not to blame”: Stern and Berger, ISIS, 30–31 (quoting Patrick Cockburn).

  “remain[ed] supportive of”: Renad Mansour, “The Sunni Predicament in Iraq” (Washington, DC: Carnegie Middle East Center, March 3, 2016), http://carnegie-mec.org/2016/03/03/sunni-predicament-in-iraq-pub-62924 (internal citations omitted).

  $1 trillion . . . 4,500 American lives . . . Iran’s power: Tim Arango, “Iran Dominates in Iraq After U.S. ‘Handed the Country Over,’” New York Times, July 15, 2017.

  Market capitalism . . . Democracy: Taken almost verbatim from Chua, World on Fire, 8–9.

  “‘The spread of free markets’”: Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), xvi.

  “tends to turn”: Ibid., 12.

  Instead of global peace: See generally Chua, World on Fire.

  As America celebrated: Taken almost verbatim from ibid., 10.

  The point is not: Taken almost verbatim from ibid., 293–94.

  Chapter Five: Terror Tribes

  Most serial murderers: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Serial Killers: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators, July 2008, 14.

  psychologists studying terrorism: John Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 51–60.

  terrorists are “narcissistic”: Ibid., 53, 56–57.

  “driven by depression”: Ibid., 32 (inner quotes omitted) (quoting Adam Lankford, The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013]).

  from low self-esteem: Ibid., 53.

  had abusive childhoods: Ibid., 54 (citing Nehemia Friedland, “Becoming a Terrorist: Social and Individual Antecedents,” in Terrorism: Roots, Impacts, Responses, ed. Lawrence Howard [New York: Praeger, 1992], 82).

  “[t]he terrorist group”: Ibid., 52 (quoting Martha Crenshaw, “The Psychology of Political Terrorism,” in Political Psychology: Contemporary Problems and Issues, ed. Margaret G. Hermann [San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986], 387).

  “vitamin deficiencies” . . . “faulty ear”: Ibid., 54 (citing Walter Reich, “Understanding Terrorist Behavior: The Limits and Opportunities of Psychological Inquiry,” in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 261–79).

  “societies where fantasies”: Ibid., 54.

  now been rejected: Ibid., 51–60; Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 16–18.

  simply no reliable evidence: Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism, 59–61.

  as “lovely,” “friendly”: Sam Greenhill and Keith Gladdis, “‘He Was Friendly and Polite’: Hairdresser Ex-Girlfriend of Terror Suspect Says Adebolajo Was a ‘Normal, Regular Boy,’” Daily Mail, May 23, 2013.

  “very personable”: Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, 4.

  “a nice guy”: Emily Bazelon, “There’s a Strong Consensus That He Was Pretty Normal,” Slate, April 19, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/04/dzhokhar_tsarnaev_seemed_like_a_nice_kid_two_high_school_classmates_remember.html.

  “terrorists are essentially”: Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism, 59 (quoting Andrew Silke, “Cheshire-Cat Logic: The Recurring Theme of Terrorist Abnormality in Psychological Research,” Psychology, Crime & Law 4 [1998]: 53).

  a group phenomenon: Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)making of Terrorists (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 33, 179–81; Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism, 105.

  Robbers Cave experiment: Muzafer Sherif et al., The Robbers Cave Experiment: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 14–48.

  Dan Kahan . . . those with stronger numeracy: Dan Kahan et al., “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” Behavioural Public Policy 1, no. 1 (2017): 54–86.

  climate change—and extended: See Dan Kahan et al., “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 732–35; Lawrence C. Hamilton, Matthew J. Cutler, and Andrew Schaefer, “Public Knowledge and Concern About Polar-Region Warming,” Polar Geography 35, no. 2 (2012): 155–68.

  The better informed . . . better educated: See Kahan et al., “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change
Risks,” 732–35; Lawrence C. Hamilton, “Education, Politics and Opinions About Climate Change Evidence for Interaction Effects,” Climatic Change 104, no. 2 (2011): 231–42; Brian Resnick, “7 Psychological Concepts That Explain the Trump Era of Politics,” Vox, March 20, 2017, http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/20/14915076/7-psychological-concepts-explain-trump-politics.

  In Solomon Asch’s: Solomon E. Asch, “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments,” in Groups, Leadership, and Men, ed. Harold Guetzkow (New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1963), 177–90.

  Robb Willer . . . “breaking the spell”: Robb Willer et al., “The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms,” American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 2 (2009): 451, 454, 462–69.

  experiments similar to Asch’s: See, e.g., Jolanda Jetten, Tom Postmes, and Brendan J. McAuliffe, “‘We’re All Individuals’: Group Norms of Individualism and Collectivism, Levels of Identification and Identity Threat,” European Journal of Social Psychology 32, no. 2 (2002): 189.

  “descends several rungs” . . . “a sentiment of invincible power”: Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 2nd ed. (Dunwoody, GA: Norman S. Berg, 1968), 9, 12–13.

  a physiological basis: See, e.g., Ian Robertson, “The Science Behind ISIL’s Savagery,” Telegraph (UK), November 17, 2014; Mina Cikara and Susan T. Fiske, “Bounded Empathy: Neural Responses to Outgroup Targets’ (Mis)Fortunes,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23, no. 12 (2011): 3791–3803.

  “black flags” . . . “It is groups”: Robertson, “The Science Behind ISIL’s Savagery.”

  out-group homogeneity effect: George Quattrone et al., “The Perception of Variability Within In-groups and Out-groups: Implications for the Law of Small Numbers,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38, no. 1 (1980): 141–52.

  with negative traits: Yona Teichman, “The Development of Israeli Children’s Images of Jews and Arabs and Their Expression in Human Figure Drawings,” Developmental Psychology 37, no. 6 (2001): 749–61.

  less than human: Ruth Gaunt, Jacques-Philippe Leyens, and Denis Sindic, “Motivated Reasoning and the Attribution of Emotions to Ingroup and Outgroup,” Revue Internationale de Psychologie Sociale 17, no. 1 (2004): 5–20; Ruth Gaunt, Jacques-Philippe Leyens, and Stéphanie Demoulin, “Intergroup Relations and the Attribution of Emotions: Control Over Memory for Secondary Emotions Associated with the Ingroup and Outgroup,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38, no. 5 (2002): 508–14; Jacques-Philippe Leyens et al., “The Emotional Side of Prejudice: The Attribution of Secondary Emotions to Ingroups and Outgroups,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 4, no. 2 (2000): 186–97.

  These effects have: Gaunt, Leyens, and Demoulin, “Intergroup Relations and the Attribution of Emotions,” 509 (Belgians and Arabs); Amy J. C. Cuddy, Mindi S. Rock, and Michael I. Norton, “Aid in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Inferences of Secondary Emotions and Intergroup Helping,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 10, no. 1 (2007): 107–18 (whites and blacks in New Orleans); Michael J. Wohl, Matthew J. Hornsey, and Shannon H. Bennett, “Why Group Apologies Succeed and Fail: Intergroup Forgiveness and the Role of Primary and Secondary Emotions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102, no. 2 (2012): 306 (Canadians and Afghans).

  “significantly more aggressive”: Teichman, “The Development of Israeli Children’s Images of Jews and Arabs and Their Expression in Human Figure Drawings,” 756.

  Roughly 64 percent . . . “very happy”: Hujierat Mussa, “Attitudes Gaps to Jewish Out-Group and Arab In-Group as an Expression of the Self-Identity of the Arab Minority in Israel,” Journal of Social and Development Sciences 1, no. 5 (2011): 173–82.

  “funny but respectful”: Ted Thornhill, “The Curly-Haired, Bearded Hipster from a Wealthy Family Who Has Become a Sword-Wielding ISIS Poster Boy,” Daily Mail (UK), August 7, 2014.

  “hot girlfriend” . . . “Every guy dreams”: Mona El-Naggar, “From a Private School in Cairo to ISIS Killing Fields in Syria,” New York Times, February 18, 2015.

  In 2012 . . . “poster boy”: Ibid.; Thornhill, “The Curly-Haired, Bearded Hipster.”

  a gradual process: Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism, 99–100, 120–24, 132.

  “fell down in a black hole”: Ben Taub, “Journey to Jihad,” New Yorker, June 1, 2015.

  Enter Sharia4Belgium: Ibid.

  “selfless heroes” . . . “You sit for months”: Ibid.

  called “the palace”: Ibid.

  “He is the youngest emir”: Ibid.

  Hundreds of Western women: Katrin Bennhold, “Jihad and Girl Power: How ISIS Lured 3 London Girls,” New York Times, August 17, 2015.

  wives stood guard: William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 114.

  “In this world”: Bennhold, “Jihad and Girl Power.”

  “world’s richest terrorist group” . . . millions of dollars a day: Amanda Macias and Jeremy Bender, “Here’s How the World’s Richest Terrorist Group Makes Millions Every Day,” Business Insider, August 27, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/isis-worlds-richest-terrorist-group-2014-8; Sarah Almukhtar, “ISIS Finances Are Strong,” New York Times, May 19, 2015.

  “We have here mujahideen”: McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 101.

  “court poets” . . . “jihadi power couple”: Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel, “Battle Lines,” New Yorker, June 8, 2015.

  Their bullets shattered: Ibid.

  Ask Mosul, city of Islam: Ibid.

  she wrote a thirty-page essay: Ibid.

  “the root cause”: David Sterman, “Don’t Dismiss Poverty’s Role in Terrorism Yet,” Time, February 4, 2015.

  inherited $25 million: Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al-Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 19.

  has a Ph.D.: William McCants, “The Believer,” Brookings, September 1, 2015, http://www.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2015/the believer.

  low per capita national income: Alberto Abadie, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism,” American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (2006): 50–56.

  individual poverty does not predict: Christopher Shea, “Another Blow to the Poverty-Causes-Terrorism Thesis,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2012; Graeme Blair et al., “Poverty and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan,” American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 1 (2013): 30–48.

  Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka: See Shri D. R. Kaarthikeyan, “Root Causes of Terrorism?: A Case Study of the Tamil Insurgency and the LTTE,” in Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality and Ways Forward, ed. Tore Bjørgo (London: Routledge, 2005), 132 (noting that Tamil terrorism was “[b]orn out of discrimination, bred under oppression and strengthened through orchestrated state violence” against Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority); see generally Gamini Samaranayake, “Political Terrorism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 172 (“The causes which have contributed to the political terrorism of the LTTE need to be viewed in the context of the ongoing ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese, who comprise 74.5 percent of the population, and the Sri Lankan or indigenous Tamils who comprise 12.5 percent”); Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005), 31, 139–47.

  Chechen separatists in Russia: See James Hughes, Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 10 (describing the “colonial enmity in the Russian-Chechen relationship” and Stalin’s “genocidal deportation” of the entire Chechen population to Central Asia in 1944 as “a defining event” for Chechens); Mariya Yevsyukova, “The Conflict Between Russia and Chechnya” (working paper no. 95-5[1], Conflict Research Consortium, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1995), http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/full_text_search/AllCRCDocs/95-5.htm
(“The notion of humiliation and respect played a significant role [in the Chechen conflict] . . . [The Chechens] have fought for their independence for centuries”).

  Nigeria’s Boko Haram: See Daniel Egiegba Agbiboa, “Why Boko Haram Exists: The Relative Deprivation Perspective,” African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review 3, no. 1 (2013): 144, 151 (noting that Boko Haram has been fueled by the fact that “the wealthy elite throughout the country tend to be Christian, while the most impoverished communities in the country” are found among primarily Muslim ethnic groups); Seth G. Jones et al., Rolling Back the Islamic State (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017), 126, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1912.html (To aid with recruitment, “Boko Haram . . . play[s] on Kanuri perceptions that they are disadvantaged relative to other Nigerians, including southern Christians and Hausa- and Fulani-speaking Muslims”); see also Mike Smith, Boko Haram: Inside Nigeria’s Unholy War (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 62; Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, “The Karma of Boko Haram,” New York Times, February 22, 2015.

  militant Islamic movements: See, e.g., Fawaz A. Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 11, 32, 40, 43, 49; Pape, Dying to Win, 31, 117–19, 129–33.

  But when stark inequalities: See Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 4 (1981): 383 (“The first condition that can be considered a direct cause of terrorism is the existence of concrete grievances among an identifiable subgroup of a larger population, such as an ethnic minority discriminated against by the majority”); see also Ted Robert Gurr, “Why Men Rebel Redux: How Valid Are Its Arguments Forty Years On?,” E-International Relations, November 17, 2011, http://www.e-ir.info/2011/11/17/why-men-rebel-redux-how-valid-are-its-arguments-40-years-on (“It is not enough to point to big economic and social structures as the ‘explanation.’ . . . it is not sufficient, maybe not even important, to analyze the abstract content of ideologies. . . . Group identity is more important: What are people’s clan, ethnic, religious, and political identities? With what people do they feel kindred, what networks of social interaction and communication connect them? The politics of identity are central to understanding people’s reference group, their sense of collective injustice, and their susceptibility to appeals for political action”).