Whatever happened to Robert Pape?

Mr. Pape is the Chicago University professor who wrote a book two years ago titled, “Dying To Win — The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.” In it he argued that it was a mistake to think that there was a close connection between suicide bombing and Islamic fundamentalism.

Having carried out case studies of 462 suicide terrorists from around the world since 1980, Mr. Pape concluded that half of them were “secular and therefore not religious fanatics,” and that 95% of suicide attacks were not about religion at all, but about “compelling modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly.”

In short, suicide bombers were just another variety of freedom fighters. They weren’t very different from you or me — or rather, they weren’t very different from what we might be like if our country were invaded by foreigners and we joined the resistance. Palestinians blowing up Israelis in cafés, Saudi Arabians crashing airplanes into American skyscrapers, wanted only for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders and for “the United States and Western countries to abandon their military commitments on the Arabian Peninsula.”

Even at the time, Mr. Pape’s thesis — which, I must say in all fairness, I am familiar with from the reviews of it, not from reading “Dying To Win” itself — struck me as being highly dubious. For one thing, the argument that half of the 462 suicide bombers investigated were “secular” because they belonged to nonreligious organizations like Fatah or the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, as opposed to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, demonstrated an ignorance of Palestinian and Muslim society, in which the pertinent distinction is rarely between “religious” and “not religious,” but rather between “more religious” and “less religious.” A totally secular Muslim who professes disbelief in Islam the way secular Jews and Christians express disbelief in Judaism and Christianity would be almost as rare a bird in Fatah as in Hamas.

Secondly, Mr. Pape never really addressed the question of why, if you are just another freedom fighter, you would be so anxious to blow yourself up with your enemies rather than kill them while seeking to survive in order to kill more of them another day. The same “secular” Palestinian who commits suicide in an Israeli café or bus could just as well, after all, plant the bomb and leave before it explodes, or rake his targets with gunfire and try to escape, as a member of an ordinary resistance group would do. The whole point of a suicide bomber, on the other hand, is not to escape, but to die a martyr’s death. In religious terms, this makes sense: The martyr goes to heaven and is blessed there. But what sense does it make in secular terms?

These, as I say, were my thoughts when Mr. Pape’s book appeared to much publicity. Now, two years later, reading daily headlines in the newspapers that say things like, “Suicide bomber kills 40 at Baghdad college,” “Suicide bombing kills 30 in Iraq café,” “Children used in Iraqi homicide bombing,” and “Suicide bombers kill 114 Iraqi pilgrims,” I sometimes wonder why we do not hear from Robert Pape these days. No doubt he’s gone on to more promising subjects.

Still, since Iraq has long since surpassed every country in the world, Israel included, in the number of its suicide bombings, one wishes Mr. Pape were around to answer a few questions. True, Iraq is currently occupied by American forces, which might at first glance appear to support his theory, yet few of the Iraqi suicide bombings have been aimed at American troops. Nearly all of them have been carried out by Sunnis against Shiites — who, far from being foreign invaders, are 60% of Iraq’s population, but who happen to be, from a Sunni point of view, religious heretics.

Can murdering Shiite pilgrims on their way to a religious shrine be construed, by any stretch of the imagination, as a form of resistance to the American occupation of Iraq? Or detonating a car bomb in a Shiite market in Baghdad with two children left inside the car to allay suspicion? Is there any possible “secular” explanation of such acts? Indeed, even in religious terms, there is only one way of understanding them: as predicated on the belief that God desires the death of heretics and that whoever kills them is doing God’s will and will be rewarded, the sooner the better, with the bliss of paradise after his death.

And if this is true of suicide bombings in Iraq, there is good reason to reject Mr. Pape’s theories about them elsewhere in the Muslim world. Of course, since the successful suicide bomber is not subject to interrogation, it is difficult to come to any definitive conclusions about what motivates him.

Yet why assume, just because a Palestinian belongs to Fatah rather than Hamas, or declares before his death that he wishes to kill, not Jews but only the “Zionist enemy,” that he is not impelled by religious motives? Why not assume that he too wishes to become a shahid, a religious martyr, which is what Fatah calls its suicide bombers no less than does Hamas? Why else choose to die in such a manner?

Unfortunately for Mr. Pape and for the rest of us, Islamic fundamentalism is closely connected to suicide bombing. It might be comforting to think that if only Israel and America and a few other countries left the poor Muslims alone, there would be no more suicide bombs to worry about. That’s not, however, what the parents of the two children dispatched to heaven from the back seat of an Iraqi car last week will tell you.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.