"Suicide bombings are part of a conscious strategy that has a record of success in other places. Suicide bombing has gained adherents not because so many fanatics are looking for an excuse to throw away their lives, but because it works.
"That's the conclusion of Robert Pape in his new book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Mr. Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism at the University of Chicago, compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack in the world from 1980 to 2003.
"Americans have trouble imagining how the insurgents could hope to succeed without any positive vision of Iraq's future - and without any apparent agenda except slaughtering people. But the core of their appeal is the same as that of most other suicide bombing campaigns: nationalistic opposition to a foreign military presence.
"From Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas on the West Bank to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka," Mr. Pape writes, "every group mounting a suicide campaign over the past two decades has had as a major objective - or as its central objective - coercing a foreign state that has military forces in what the terrorists see as their homeland to take those forces out." Even 9/11 was part of al-Qaida's long-standing effort to force the United States to withdraw its forces from Saudi Arabia.
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