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Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, "Can the United States
Save Itself in the Middle East?":<br>
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...Last month, the New America Foundation and the University of
Chicago's Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) sponsored a
conference in Washington, entitled "Cutting the Fuse: Moving beyond
the War on Terror." The conference was sparked by the publication of
a new book by CPOST's director, Robert Pape, and James Feldman,
entitled <i>Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide
Terrorism and How to Stop It </i>(University of Chicago Press,
2010). The book - as well as the conference it prompted - offers
important if also politically inconvenient insights for U.S.
policymakers seeking to revive America's declining strategic
position in the Middle East. <i>Cutting the Fuse</i> extends what
is already a well-established body of work by Bob Pape assessing the
root causes of suicide terrorism and drawing the implications of
that analysis for U.S. policy in the Middle East. In his 2005 book,
<i>Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism</i>, Bob
analyzed a massive data base of suicide attacks perpetrated around
the world between 1980 and 2003 to demonstrate that (in Pape's
words) <b>"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"</b>...<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/leverett091110.html">http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/leverett091110.html</a><br>
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