Suicide Attacks

Recently, Random House published a book by Robert Pape titled Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005). The book looks at what we know from many news reports of suicide bombing attacks in the Middle East. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article about the book:

Pape claims to have compiled the world’s first “database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 — 315 attacks in all” (3). “The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions. . . . Rather, 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” (4). It is important that Americans understand this growing phenomenon (4-7).
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_to_Win accessed 2/25/09