I was listening to NPR this morning and an interesting comment was made--one that mirrored ideas I've been mulling over in my head for some time. Paraphrased, the comment was "suicide bombers tend to come from nations occupied by foreign troops".
I found myself saying to the radio, "Thank you, finally somebody gets it!". Foreign nations do not want our troops occupying them, pushing them around, imposing our forms of government upon them. They do not like us telling them how to run their nations and they don't think PNAC is a benificent organization. But unfortunately our "great leaders" have the wrong response to attacks such as suicide bombers. They send in more troops, thereby only adding fuel to the fire.
I found this article online, which illuminates the issue very well:
What Makes Suicide Bombers TickExerpts:
PREVAILING MISCONCEPTIONS. The implications: There's a connection between September 11 and the war in Iraq, radical Islamic fundamentalists are behind all of the suicide bombings in Iraq, and they're spurring insurgencies throughout the Islamic Crescent. Yet government studies of intelligence failures and Pape's analysis indicate there's no evidence that any of this is true...."The presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and may be encouraging domestic and foreign policies likely to worsen America's situation and to harm many Muslims needlessly," he writes.
.....
FEEDING THE ENEMY. The mere presence of foreign troops is the instigation for the attacks, so lengthy stays to secure democracy actually make attacks more probable and help boost recruitment. Substituting Iraqi security forces for U.S. troops is the only thing that will likely make a difference. Pape notes that arrests of al Qaeda and other insurgent leaders are rising, but the metric that counts is the number of attacks, and they're rising, too. That suggests al Qaeda is growing stronger, not weaker.
Equally troubling is that even as the total number of terrorist attacks globally is declining, the number of suicide attacks is rising. The first five months of this year saw as many suicide attacks as all of last year.
(More at above link)