On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, ravi posted part of an interview with Robert Pape
> http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1418817.htm
and while it contains his central contention:
> ROBERT PAPE: There's a faulty premise in the current strategy on the war
> on terrorism. That faulty premise is that suicide terrorism and Al Qaeda
> suicide terrorism in particular is mainly driven by an evil ideology
> Islamic fundamentalism independent of other circumstances. However, the
> facts are that since 1980, suicide terrorist attacks from around the
> world over half have been secular. What over 95 per cent of suicide
> attacks around the world [are about] is not religion, but a specific
> strategic purpose - to compel modern democracies to withdraw military
> forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or
> prize greatly and this is in fact a centrepiece of Al Qaeda's strategic
> logic, which is to compel the United States and Western countries to
> abandon military commitments on the Arabian Peninsula.
I think you leave out his best bit: using Hezbollah as an example of how suicide bombing stopped when the occupation stopped *even though* the group in question had and still has as its goal the construction of an Islamic state (and even though it's original attack mastermind was one of the blood- thirstiest bastards of them all, Imad Mughniyah). He says the reason suicide bombing stops after the occupation in question stops is because after that point, the goal changes to one for which suicide bombings is no longer an effective tactic:
KERRY O'BRIEN: When you look at the motivation of Osama bin Laden and
other extreme fundamentalists, isn't it their ultimate goal to
establish their particular brand of fundamentalism right through the
Middle East?
ROBERT PAPE: There's no question that Osama bin Laden himself appears
to have goals beyond simply ejecting Western combat forces from the
Arabian Peninsula. The real question is whether he would be able to
use suicide attack to achieve those goals. We've seen in the case of
Lebanon that other suicide terrorist groups, also with such goals,
such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, which also had the goal to create an
Islamic state, and also used suicide terrorist attack to eject foreign
combat forces from its territory. What we've seen is once those combat
forces left, the terrorist group was not able to continue a suicide
terrorist campaign. Once American forces left Lebanon, Hezbollah
attackers did not follow us to New York. Once Israeli forces left
Lebanon, Hezbollah suicide attackers did not follow Israel into Tel
Aviv. Instead, what's happened over time is, Hezbollah has abandoned
suicide attack and virtually abandoned terrorism itself and become,
since the early 1990s, more or less a mainstream political party. It
still has its goal of trying to pursue an Islamic fundamentalist state
but it's not using suicide attack or really violence at all to achieve
that end.
<end excerpt>
Michael