What is the motivation behind Suicide Terror?
"When it comes to suicide bombing, I, like many others, always assumed that the driving force behind the practice was Islamic Fundamentalism. Promise of instant entry into paradise as a reward for killing infidels was said to explain the suicides. The world's expert on suicide terrorism convinced me to rethink this apparently plausable answer. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, for his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, collected a database of all 462 syucude terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2004. One thing he found was that religious beliefs were less important as motivating factors than we had believed. The world's leaders in suicide terrorism are actually the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist secular group. The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attacks. No one has come from Iran or Sudan.[editors emphasis]
The clincher is this: the stongest motivation, according to Pape, is not religion but rather a desire "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland." Between 1995 and 2004, the al Qaeda years, two-thirds of all attacks came from countries where the US had troops stations. While al Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to hail from a country with a strong Wahabist (radical Islamic) presence, they are TEN TIMES as likely to come from a country in which US troops are stationed. Until the US. invasion in 2003, Iraq had never had a suicide terrorist attack in its entire history. [Editors Note: there was not any al Qaeda in Iraq before the invasion] Between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide terrorist attacks in Lebanon. Once the US, France and Israel withdrew their forces from Lebanon there were no more attacks. The reason the attacks stop, according to Pape, is that the Osama bin Ladens of the world can no longer inspire poential sucide terrorists, regardless of their religious beliefs... Predictably enough, al Qaeda recruitment has exploded since the invasion of Iraq...
Although most Americans don't know it, for much of the early twentieth century our country had an excellent reputation in the Middle East, the part of the world we are told will hate us no matter what... Pape is convinced after his extensive research that the longer and more extensive the occupation of Muslim territories, the greater the chance of more 9/11-type attacks on the United States."
- Ron Paul, from his book The Revolution: A Manifesto ...
order of information has been edited slightly for readers convenience
"James Bamfor [author of A Pretext for War (2005) and Body of Secrets (2002)] observes that the leadership of al Qaeda hoped to lure us into a 'desert Viteman,' and enormously expensive war that would deplete our resources and help their own recruitment by stirring up the locals against us... The terrorists, in short, have played us like a fiddle... according to a study by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel, the vast bulk of the foreign fighters in Iraq are people who had never been involved in terrorist activity before but have been radicalized by the US presence in Iraq [and] the war's ultimate cost is being estimated in trillions."
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