It's the occupation, stupid! posted by Richard Seymour

Excellent article by Scott Horton with the American academic Robert Pape talking about the causes of suicide bombing:

[Robert Pape] said that after 9/11 he assumed the Koran might contain clues toward understanding what motivates a person to commit a suicide bombing. For his book, however, Pape started with the bombings themselves – every documented case between 1980 and 2004 – and noticed some suggestive common threads. Foreign occupation, it seems – not religion – is the core motivating factor behind suicide terrorism. From Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank to Sikhs in India, from the jihadists of 9/11 to the secular Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – for all of these, it is "a nationalistic response."

Further:

Professor Pape says that while al-Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to be from a country where radical Salafist/Wahhabist Islam is widely practiced, they are 10 times more likely to have come from a country that has U.S. troops stationed in it ... according to a Saudi poll after 9/11, 95 percent of educated Saudi males between the ages of 25 and 41 agreed with bin Laden's goal of driving Americans off their holy land.

Those who think it is simply a result of perverted, poisonous ideologies - by which they mean political Islam - might want to consider that:

No suicide bombers have ever come from Iran, where there are no foreign troops. Iraq had never seen a suicide bombing on its soil before U.S. troops arrived in 2003. While Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980s criticizing American culture, many people agreed, but none resorted to suicide bombing. When bin Laden cited U.S. forces in the land of Mecca and Medina, men hopped on planes with knives.

For the chronologists, forever reminding us that 9/11 and Bali preceded Iraq, a note or two:

As Harry Browne has pointed out, history does not begin on 9/11. In fact, American intervention in the Middle East dates back to 1919, when U.S. participation in World War I helped turn the entire region over to the British and the French, who then drew borders to their own liking for the states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, what was Palestine, etc.

Since the Second World War, the U.S. government has dominated each of the Middle Eastern states at one time or another, and consistently a majority of them. It has supported bloody coups; backed fascist monsters like Shah Reza Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak; armed and financed both sides of wars; propped up puppet kings, sultans, and emirs; and helped the Israeli government kill, steal, and destroy with our money. To top it off, it has now waged a bloody war and a terrible blockade of Iraq – all from bases in the "land of two Holy Places," the Arabian Peninsula.

And finally, a few words for Jack Straw, who asked about the motives of the bombers in London, noted that "[the terrorists] struck in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Indonesia, in the Yemen. They struck this weekend in Turkey, which was not supporting our action in Iraq. It is the terrorists who will seek any excuse whatsoever for their action":

The terrorists struck Americans in Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Yemen. Locals who were also killed were collateral damage, so to speak. As for the attack in Turkey, it was committed by our allies the Kurds. Why didn't Straw go ahead and mention the Mujahedin e-Khalq terrorist cult of Islamo-Marxists that the coalition of the willing sent into Iran to bomb civilians only a few weeks back?

Now, all of this flies directly in the face of the liberal bombers' expectations, who would doubtless take these explanatory models as somehow apologetic. But I haven't been impressed by their attempts to understand suicide bombing. Norman Geras, for instance, when trying to explain Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel [contra Terry Eagleton], approvingly cited Linda Grant :

Some research has been done on the motives of suicide bombers, by interviewing those who failed to pull it off. Amazingly, they reported that they did it because it was cool. Now in prison, their principal request is for hair gel. I kid you not.

Unfortunately, she - well, let's put it kindly and say she misremembered the 'research' she was quoting, as I discovered when I e-mailed her.

The only kind of thesis that such people will allow is one that focuses on narcisstic motives or, ex nihilo, a 'fascistic' ideology. Anything else amounts to apologetics from 'the root causes brigade'. Well, those 'apologists' now include an Israeli think-tank and the Saudi government, whose research has discovered that:

the vast majority of these foreign fighters [in Iraq] are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself.

Further:

The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the "central front" in a battle against the United States.

No matter how much evidence mounts in Iraq, Palestine or elsewhere; no matter what intelligence or establishment think-tanks say; no matter what the public may say - the liberal bombers will forever shirk responsibility for the consequences of actions which they supported. Hence, the witch-hunts, the brow-beating, the shrill accusations, the hysterical outbursts, and the insistence on pursuing any line of thought that could potentially lead away from and change the argument.