the fallacy of islamic 'national suicide':
A new buzzword is arising from the network of Israeli think tanks and security-oriented academic departments bent on instigating a U.S. attack on Iran: "national suicide." The term describes a supposed Arab Muslim tradition of politically motivated suicide at the national, not just individual, level. Arab Muslim regimes have purportedly launched ruinous wars they could not have reasonably hoped to win, condemning their nations to destruction.
(...) "National suicide" will soon be an incantation by neoconservative and other pro-Israeli pundits and politicians on the "bomb Iran" bandwagon. Its strategic implications are clear: We can't trust irrational regimes because they are not deterred by threat of annihilation. Therefore, extraordinary actions -- such as preemptive attack -- may be not only justified but necessary. It further shifts moral responsibility to the victim. In the "national suicide" formulation, it is the martyr that chooses death, while the actual killers are merely the instrument by which the suicide -- or, as the case may be, the destruction of a country -- is carried out.
(...) "National suicide" is easier to believe in if you're willing to lump all Arabs and all Muslims into a single mind-set. For example, the Palestinian national movement under Arafat was staunchly secular; members of the non-Arab Taliban are Islamist extremists. The concept elides the enormous diversity within the Arab and Muslim worlds and ignores the local particularities of their multifarious -- and sometimes ideologically opposed -- political movements. A hint of these intra-regional tensions was displayed in Bin Laden's recent audiotape denouncing Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
(...) Arafat, for his part, continued negotiating after Camp David in Taba and never chose to ignite the second intifada. The uprising was sparked by Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Al Aqsa mosque and was fueled by Palestinians' sense of betrayal over a peace process that brought no peace but doubled the number of Israeli settlers on their land. The "Arafat chose violence" canard was rejected by the Mitchell report. Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, concluded: "Yasser Arafat neither prepared nor triggered the intifada."
(...) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a convenient whipping boy. He has frequently predicted Israel's eventual demise, and yet -- accurately translated -- he has not threatened it with offensive attack. Nor does he command the country's armed forces.