The Root Cause Debate
Robert Pape explains what motivates suicide terrorism.
As a coda to the Hitchens/Wright debate and Thomas Friedman's call for a Muslim civil war, this 2006 interview with Robert Pape is definitely worth watching (if you're not snowed in at the moment and want to get to the meat, it's around the 30 minute mark). Pape's thesis, if you're not familiar with it, is that suicide terrorism specifically has very concrete origins that have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism and everything to do with the presence of foreign military forces on the terrorists' soil or on land they prize:
