Christopher Hitchens renews scrutiny of, and puts pressure on, the apologists' theme that suicide bombings are caused by despair. I think he strays too close, in doing this, to the suggestion - easy to rebut - that despair can't have anything to do with suicide bombings if their incidence is sensitive to other factors as well. He says, for example:
If despair is what has invaded your mind, why on earth would you care about this or that short-term truce?
The implication of the question, and of one or two statements adjacent to it in the same column, is that despair provides an all-powerful impulse towards suicide bombing or else it does nothing. To which it could be said that people in despair might just be more predisposed towards this form of murderous politics than non-despairing people are.
Hitch's argument hits home, nonetheless, against those who deploy the despair theme in open excuse-making mode: by speaking, as they often do, as if despair is the sufficient cause of suicide bombing; or by saying that suicide bombers have no choice but to do what they do, being as desperate as they are. For he focuses on the decisive role in procuring suicide bombing of those who make the strategic and moral decision that it should be used. This element exposes the despair defence for the apologia it is, because it is a simple fact that movements of national liberation do not always choose to murder civilians. There's a willed politics behind suicide bombing, not merely an emotional condition.