The Kamikaze piolts that killed 5,000 Americans in WW2 were not fighting any occupation and they thought the Emporer divine.

It is also worth noting that as far as AlQaida is concerned Spain is occupied.

I suppose they could say the same thing about Egypt and if the Iraqis succeed in creating a democratic government then Iraq will be occupied whether the coalition forces are there or not.

But all or almost all suicide terrorism is founded in religion. Pape had to scour the world to find suicide terrorism that wasn’t religious, all he could find is the Tamil Tigers, and in the recent Pape interview Roger posted a link to, Pape disingenuously leads the reader to believe their is no religious dispute involved – certainly there is in Sri Lanka.

Palestinian terrorism proves the point. To the best of my memory in the 60′s and 70′s most terrorism was not suicide terrorism, but by remote bombs or armed attacks with a chance, even if small, for escape. The attacks were made in the name of various Marxist organizations. In the 80′s or so, when religious elements took the helm, like Hamas, Suicide bombings increased. There’s no heaven for a marxist, for an Islamist there is quite a pleasant one.

It now appears, for example, that Pakistanis were responsible for the weekend’s suicide attacks in Egypt. Pape’s theory of “occupation causation” only survives Sharm al-Sheik if you subscribe to al Qaeda’s argument that Egypt is “occupied” by an apostate government in league with the Zionist-Crusader conspiracy. This, however, is an intolerably expansive definition of “occupation” that no nation, Muslim or Western, can tolerate. Pape’s conclusion, then, is either wrong (if we define “occupation” in its usual sense) or useless (if we define “occupation” to refer to any government that al Qaeda would describe as “apostate” or otherwise in league with the “Zionist-Crusader” conspiracy).

Charlie in Colorado:

[T]he problem with Pape’s argument is that it’s either historically false — because, after all, suicidal attacks and what we now call terrorism have a long history, and have occurred in many places that weren’t essentially occupations — or it’s vacuously true because the definition of “occupation” is infinitely malleable.

He noted, smugly.