World View/Paul Gillespie: "The politics of America and Blair are the reason they did it. The bombers want revenge without thinking properly. But it is too easy to condemn them as evil. What they did was horrible and wrong. But when you think that 12,000 people are killed in Falluja and no one cares, but 50 or so are killed in London and it's totally different. That is what makes people so angry. It's very wrong what happened, but it's important to understand why it happened."
In these seven crisp sentences Hassam Hadi, an Iraqi living in Dublin, spoke more sense about the London bombings than most others in the huge outpouring of reportage and commentary that followed. There was initially a certain understandable taboo about linking the bombings to Iraq in British political and media comment. George Galloway and Charles Kennedy got jumped on for doing so, while Ken Livingstone excluded the linkage from his otherwise inspiring comments about multicultural London as a haven for poor villagers escaping Islamic oppression.
This week saw some of the worst suicide bombings ever in Baghdad, which received "normal" coverage, quite different from that accorded the revelations that suicide bombers were also responsible for the London atrocities, as if to bear out Mr Hadi's point.
Both are reprehensible - but how are we to understand why they happened? Recourse to pop psychology, Islamophobia or the ethics and theology of evil-doing cannot get us very far. It is better to look at the phenomenon of suicide bombing in its historical, organisational and political setting.
Scott Atran, a US specialist on the subject, writing in the Washington Quarterly last summer, finds that the common US administration and media spin on the war against terrorism assumes suicide attackers are evil, deluded or homicidal misfits who thrive in poverty, ignorance and anarchy.
This is almost wholly inaccurate, according to all the serious studies. Suicide bombers and their supporters are rarely ignorant or impoverished, crazed, cowardly or asocial. Atran underlines how important organisational factors are in the appeal, with strong community support.
Thus the latest Pew international poll finds that nearly half of the Muslims in Lebanon, Morocco and Jordan support suicide bombings as a way of countering the application of military might by the US in Iraq and by Israel in Palestine, although the poll registers a decline for the support of violence against civilians in defence of Islam.
This is the phenomenon of asymmetrical warfare, in which the weaker side finds it rational to use such a devastating method against qualitatively stronger opponents. Nor is there any evidence that most people who support suicide actions hate Americans' internal cultural freedoms or way of life, "but rather every indication that they oppose US foreign policies, particularly regarding the Middle East".
Recruits have no appreciable psychopathology, are often wholly committed to what they regard as devout moral principles, are generally well adjusted in their families and often better educated and more prosperous than their surrounding population.
Demographic data on 462 suicide bombers throughout the world since 1980 collected by Robert Pape, a political scientist in Chicago, show most are "walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists their first experience with violence is their own suicide-terrorist attack", he told the American Conservative in a fascinating interview this week.
His book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, has just been published, based on an exhaustive analysis of all these individual cases.
Nor is Islamic fundamentalism as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many believe, said Pape. This is a misleading view. It can lead to disastrous policy conclusions, such as the necessity for a wholesale transformation of Muslim societies to root out terrorism. In fact the modern world leader in suicide bombing is a secular Marxist group, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Their assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 gave the idea of the suicide vest to the Palestinians.
In clear terms the American Conservative interviewer asked Pape: "So, if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?" His reply clearly sets out his thesis: "The central fact is that, overwhelmingly, suicide- terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide- terrorist campaign - over 95 per cent of all incidents - has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw."
The trouble with the notion that Islamic fundamentalism is the ideological bedrock of suicide bombing is that the consequent use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies "over there" is likely to increase the number of attacks "coming at us".
The emphasis on democratic states refers to their public opinion: "The purpose of a suicide-terrorist attack is not to die. It is the kill, to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society in order to compel that target society to put pressure on its government to change policy." The evidence shows that when policy changes suicide bombing eases off or stops - as in Lebanon when the US, French and Israelis withdrew.
If Islamic fundamentalism does drive al-Qaeda type suicide bombers we would expect Iran or Sudan to have produced most of them; but none of them comes from there. Two-thirds are from countries where the US has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990. Before the US invasion of Iraq there were no suicide bombing attacks in that country. After the US and Britain invaded it has doubled every year.
The conclusion is clear. Since there is a strategic logic behind such atrocities, withdrawal is the best way to avoid them. Pape says: "The longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11, whether this is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack or a biological attack."
These are uncomfortable research findings, but Blair and Bush will ignore them at their peril. The trouble now is that, having intervened, there is a risk of even greater conflict if they prematurely withdraw - leaving aside the long-term strategic and resource reasons they have to stay. Either way, it's an unholy mess.