to the discovery that a very small percentage of American Muslims can envision circumstances in which suicide bombs in defense of their religion might be justified.

Robert Pape: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people6/Pape/pape-con0.html

Dying To Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism

I immediately realized that we didn't have much of a factual basis for making judgments about the causes of suicide terrorism. To the extent I had any initial idea -- like most people, I thought the suicide terrorism was a product of Islamic fundamentalism -- I found myself reaching for a Koran, but more than anything else, I found myself, as these interviews went on over weeks, collecting data in a notebook of the actual attacks that had occurred over time, because I couldn't find anyone who had actually collected the data on suicide terrorist attacks around the world. My social science instincts told me [that] absent that, we wouldn't be able to make a judgment about what is the cause and not the cause of suicide terrorism...

Well, it may sound fairly simple, and it is. We have to collect the data on the actual suicide attacks that have occurred around the world over a period of time, and we want to know not only where they have occurred with some degree of certainty, we want to know where they haven't occurred with a fair degree of certainty. This is a little bit like studying lung cancer. We not only want to know who gets cancer, we want to know who doesn't get cancer, and we want to be tracking this closely enough and with enough confidence in our research that we can be highly confident that we have the right information.

That kind of a project, that instinct, led me to collect the first complete database of every suicide terrorist attack around the world, from 1980 through early 2004, and then since then, I've updated this database for the crucial case of Iraq, just through December of 2005. That database contains 462 suicide terrorists who've killed themselves in order to kill other innocents. What's one of the most striking things about those 462, over half are secular. The world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. They're a Marxist group, a secular group, a Hindu group. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka have done more suicide terrorist attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Further, about 30 percent of all Muslim suicide attacks are carried out by secular suicide terrorist groups, such as the PKK in Turkey. That's a Kurdish terrorist group in Turkey.

What this means is that over half of all suicide terrorist attacks, all around the world since 1980, pretty much since they've begun in the modern period, are not associated with Islamic fundamentalism. If that's the case, then Islamic fundamentalism is not as tightly associated with suicide terrorism as most people think.

I have tried reading this a couple times

In that debate, John McCain stood out as a bizarre exception, as the soft principled moderate, all because he opposes torture (even though he negotiated and voted for The Millitary Commissions Act), which cheers loudly for proclamations in support of it.

What cheers loudly? Torture itself, the MCA?

At this blog, early birds catch not-fully-edited versions of the posts. That "weird sentence" was the by-product of an editing error which caused parts of two different sentences to be patched together. It is now fixed.

Every word G.G. writes further punctures the American Idol/Paris Hilton bubble that we live in.

“. . . the transformation of its base from Falwell/Robertson social conservatives obsessed with abortion and gay rights into a macro version of the Little Green Footballs comment section.”

This is exactly what has happened. It's hard to watch the events of the last five years and not think that there is an underlying racism that motors a lot of the current thought, rhetoric, and action of the GOP base. I think the acceptability of this mindset has been accomplished in baby steps, by referring to The Terrorists as an undifferentiated mass and through constant fear-stoking in popular and news media (the use of a “24” plot point in the GOP debate was so surreal that I’m still having a hard time getting my head around it).

Your posts this week have been incredibly important because you're addressing an underlying worldview driving hardest-core Bush supporters – something not discussed in mainstream political discussions. I have yet to see in any mainstream outlet any substantive consideration of the role of race, racism, ethnocentrism, and/or xenophobia in current anti-terror policies (to my mind, Ornicus currently proffers the best analysis of those issues).

Just ask what kind of people spend more wealth per year on a military budget than the rest of the world combined and you quickly come to the realization that America/Americans are the most violent people on earth.

Just ask what kind of people could waste $450 billion a year on non-productive military expenditures while 48 million of its own citizens (most of which are children) go without health coverage?

Just ask what kind of people could spend billions per week on an illegal, unnecessary invasion... destroy a nation, poison that nation's environment and people for generations to come with depleted uranium munitions while the leadership of the government heaps tax breaks on the obscenely wealthy and urges the population to 'go shopping'?

And what kind of people could stand by silently while its elected government endorses in law torture, rendition, endless detainment without charges or due process and who say nothing as they fork over the age old right to habeas corpus?

What kind of people could do all that are the kind of people that first and foremost view violence as a means to their ends and that believe that might makes right. In other words some serious psychotic, dangerous people.

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Keep up the *great* work, by the way.

It would be helpful to know exactly how these questions were put to the foreign citizens. There could be significant bias if the survey was administered by westerners, or by foreign counterparts known to work with westerners, or if they were made aware in any way that this was an American study. In many cases, the strain of questioning in a survey alone is enough to deduce its motives/origin. Methodology is important.