What can terrorists teach us?

Three new studies, by very different authors taking very different tacks, reach much the same conclusion about modern terrorism: that its practitioners, especially its foot soldiers, are motivated not so much by Islamic fantasies of the caliphate's restoration and the snuffing of freedom, but rather by resistance to foreign occupation of Arab lands.

Nothing about this conclusion makes terrorist acts more justified, or less abhorrent, or a slighter assault on the bonds of civilization. Understanding is not the same as excusing. Still, understanding can be a useful tool for devising a cogent response and an effective policy.

The most provocative and widely read study is Robert Pape's book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Pape, a military historian and professor at the University of Chicago, catalogued every terrorist suicide bombing from 1983 to 2003—in all, 315 attacks carried out by 462 bombers. He concludes that, except for a couple of dozen random incidents, these bombings were elements of various coordinated campaigns—involving 18 different organizations over a 20-year period—all of which had in common "a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from the terrorists' national homeland."

A narrower, but in some ways more revealing, study was published in March by the Israel-based Global Research in International Affairs Center. (As far as I know, it has received no U.S. press coverage besides Bryan Bender's story in the July 17 Boston Globe.) The study's author, Reuven Paz, researched the backgrounds of 154 foreign Arabs who had died in Iraq during the previous six months, including 33 who had died in suicide bombings. (Their names were listed on an Islamist Web site.)

Paz's key finding: "The vast majority of Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activities prior to their arrival in Iraq."

This is consistent with a study commissioned by the Saudi government and set to be published next month by the conservative Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. (This study is also described in Bender's Globe piece.) Its author, Nawaf Obaid, a consultant in London, researched the backgrounds of about 250 Saudis who went to fight in Iraq. They included 42 who died, 30 who were turned back at the border by Syrian authorities, about 150 who are still in Iraq (fighting, captured, or possibly dead), and another 70 or 80 who are on Pentagon lists of foreign combatants. Obaid had access to official Saudi interrogations; he and his assistant also interviewed many of the fighters' families.

Nearly all these Saudis, Obaid told me in a phone interview, were 16- to 25-year-olds, many from prominent families. They watched the destructive images of the war on Arabic satellite TV, and they read the jihadist Web sites' urgings to go repel the infidel's occupation. ("Abu Ghraib was just a disaster," Obaid said, "a resounding call to these kids.")

President George W. Bush frequently depicts the foreign Arabs in Iraq as comrades of the 9/11 hijackers, enemies of freedom who might be wreaking havoc here if they weren't fighting over there. Yet if the Arabs in Paz's and Obaid's studies are typical, Bush's portrait is off the mark. Their calls to arms may be drenched in Pan-Islamic rhetoric. Those doing the calling—Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—may have more cataclysmic ambitions. But the young fanatics on the ground, those streaming across the Iraqi border, seem motivated more by the classic goals of national liberation movements.

It's worth noting, in this regard, that Bin Laden himself issued his jihad against all Americans and infidels—which led to the 9/11 attacks—as a response to the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil during and after the 1991 Gulf War. Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the 2003 Iraq war, recognized this. One rationale he gave for invading Baghdad was that for its own security, the United States needed to withdraw from Saudi Arabia but that doing so would destabilize the region if Saddam Hussein were left in power. (He didn't stop to think that the invasion might sink us in a much deeper occupation, which would lure more terrorists still.)

Again, none of this is to condone al-Qaida's atrocities or to mitigate their monstrousness. But it does fit with the theory that the alarmingly widespread fury against the United States these days is directed—as Pape puts it in his book—not so much at who we are but at what we do.