July 12, 2005
On The Origins of International Terrorism
I have been overtaken by the latest blogosphere craze, it seems. I spent the last day or so chopping up and pasting together a treatise-sized post on the origins of terrorism and their similarity to the causes of revolutionary movements in general, but I find that Robert Pape has outdone we with actual scientific research:
"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."
Pape did a study (courtesy Dan Drezner) on over 300 terrorist suicide attacks over the past 25 years and found that they were overwhelmingly in response to foreign occupation, real or imagined.
What this says about our prospects in Iraq, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Posted by ben at July 12, 2005 08:50 PM