“Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”, a book by Associate Professor Robert Pape at the University of Chicago powerfully dismantles the traditional myths around suicide terrorism.
Over the past few years suicide terrorism has come to be exclusively seen, in the west, as a terror tactic with no strategic objective and practiced by “people who hate our freedom” aka Muslim fundamentalists.
Dr. Pape, who over the years has “collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004″, using a variety of sources ranging from local newspapers to informational “products” from the “terrorist community”, found after analyzing the data that “overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.”
Of course the idea that some how “hating the freedom” that we have motivates people to blow themselves does not to stand up to any sort of reasoning. The clique of people who “hate our freedoms” obviously goes beyond Islamic fundamentalists. In the previous iteration it was Communists, who hated our freedoms, and yet there were very few, if any, suicide attacks against US or the posse of nations who considered themselves the beacon of freedom.
The idea that suicide terrorism is somehow tied to Islamic fundamentalism also falters for the most famous practitioners of suicide terrorism are a nationalist Hindu group, LTTE –better known as the Tamil Tigers.