Suicide Bombing

Via Kevin Drum Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst and author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
reviews Robert Pape's book Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Pape and colleagues have made a study of all the suicides terrorist incidents of recent history, and the facts compelling refute the glib nonsense spouted by Bush and friends. Some excerpts from Scheuer's book review:

In scholarly and low-key prose, Pape delivers the results of his own extensive research and that done by the University of Chicago's Project on Suicide Terrorism. In so doing, Pape demolishes the relentlessly repeated assertion of the neoconservatives and Israeli politicians that Islamist suicide attacks against America and other counties are launched by undereducated, unemployed, alienated, apocalyptic fanatics who are eager to kill themselves because Americans vote, have civil liberties, and allow women to drive cars. This assertion always has been transparently false, and I have argued so in my own work on al-Qaeda. It has been, however, an assertion that is easy to protect because its authors simply dismiss their critics by calling them anti-Semites, thereby foreclosing debate. But Pape avoids contentious rhetoric and employs facts to kill the assertion, and he does so coolly and with the precision of a Marine sniper.

And, from Pape

...what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland...

If Scheuer and Pape are correct, trying to impose "democracy" and our culture on unwilling others at gunpoint is exactly the most wrongheaded strategy possible. Scheuer advocates instead

For near-term self-defense, America must kill as many of this generation of terrorists as possible while simultaneously beginning to terminate the interventionist policies and presence that motivate our present enemies ...