On Friday
Kos relates the opinion of "Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has conducted extensive research into the motives of suicide terrorists". I found a fantastic
interview with Prof. Pape in The American Conservative that's well worth reading in full.
His research has revealed that suicide bombing is driven (surprise!) by military occupation, and not religious fundamentalism on its own. People don't blow themselves up because they can't bear the thought of our freedoms. People blow themselves up to change the policies of an occupying power.
The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
there's more...
It's instructive to follow along with the pattern of suicide bombing that Prof. Pape's research has revealed.
First, the seemingly definitive identification between suicide bombing and Islamic fundamentalism is broken:
Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.
He goes on to debunk Bush's fight 'em over there rationale for war:
People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
This rationale is further destroyed by evidence concerning the general origin of people who become suicide bombers.
TAC: So your assessment is that there are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there were in March 2003?
RP: I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.
There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.
It's such a blessing to have well-researched facts to back up the obvious: the war isn't fighting terrorists, but creating them.
And not, of course, only creating them in Iraq. Pape also relates that Osama had been predicting the invasion of Iraq and its dismemberment into three states. In 1996.
In 1996, he went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States—that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.
In sum, the Bush 'War on Terror', waged to allegedly pre-empt the threat of another 9/11, has manifested exactly those conditions most likely to inspire it.
TAC: What do you think the chances are of a weapon of mass destruction being used in an American city?
RP: I think it depends not exclusively, but heavily, on how long our combat forces remain in the Persian Gulf. The central motive for anti-American terrorism, suicide terrorism, and catastrophic terrorism is response to foreign occupation, the presence of our troops. The longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian Peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11, whether that is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack, or a biological attack.