Robert Pape Quotations

However, this presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and maybe encouraging domestic and foreign policies that are likely to worsen America's situation.

Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us... Suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon.

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion.

You could not have done it better than Hughes.

What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.

Suicide terrorist groups are [not] religious cults isolated from the rest of their society, ... Rather, suicide terrorist organizations often command broad social support within the national communities from which they recruit, because they are seen as pursuing legitimate nationalist goals, especially liberation from foreign occupation.

I don't want to give a sense of false security, ... but right now we're doing pretty well.