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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Why Study Military Coercion? -- 2. Explaining Military Coercion -- 3. Coercive Air Power -- 4. Japan, 1944-1945 -- 5. Korea, 1950-1953 -- 6. Vietnam, 1965-1972 -- 7. Iraq, 1991 -- 8. Germany, 1942-1945 -- 9. Beyond Strategic Bombing -- Appendix: Coding Cases of Coercive Air Power -- Index

Why focus on suicide terrorism -- Analytic overview -- Why occupation ignites suicide terrorism -- What really motivates transnational suicide terrorists -- The largest suicide terrorist campaigns -- Iraq -- Afghanistan -- Pakistan -- Al Qaeda -- Lebanon -- Israel and Palestine -- Chechnya -- Sri Lanka -- The end of fear, the beginning of understanding

Political scientist Robert Pape has created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. Here he provides a groundbreaking demographic profile of modern suicide terrorist attackers--and his findings offer a powerful counterpoint to conventional assumptions. He also examines the early practitioners of this guerrilla tactic, including the ancient Jewish Zealots, who in A.D. 66 wished to liberate themselves from Roman occupation; the Ismaili Assassins, a Shi'ite Muslim sect in northern Iran in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; World War II's Japanese kamikaze pilots, three thousand of whom crashed into U.S. naval vessels; and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a secular, Marxist-Leninist organization responsible for more suicide terrorist attacks than any other group in history. This is a work of analysis grounded in fact, not politics, that recommends concrete ways for states to fight and prevent terrorist attacks now.--From publisher description

When should the United States and other members of the international community intervene to stop a government from harming its own citizens? Since World War II, the main standard for intervention has been the high bar of genocide, although the international community has rarely acted to stop it. The main alternative—the "responsibility to protect"—would set the bar so low that virtually every instance of anarchy or tyranny would create unbounded obligations beyond the capacity of states to fulfill. A new standard—the pragmatic standard of humanitarian intervention—can help guide decisionmakers on when to intervene to stop governments from targeting their own citizens. The standard has three requirements: (1) an ongoing campaign of mass homicide sponsored by the government; (2) a viable plan for intervention with reasonable estimates of low casualties for the intervening forces; and (3) a workable strategy for creating lasting local security for the threatened population. The pragmatic standard was met in the recent successful intervention in Libya as well as in other cases over the last twenty years, and it should become the basis for deciding which humanitarian crises justify international intervention in the future.

Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay (2008) allege that I have committed the sin of sampling on the dependent variable by considering only the universe of suicide terrorist attacks rather than the universe of all imaginable instances when potential or actual terrorists might have committed suicide attacks, and so cannot measure the effects of any independent variables. They go on to describe a method that they say I should have used, which is not of interest because the accusation that is supposed to motivate this discussion is inaccurate.The main claim—that my work on suicide terrorism samples on the dependent variable—is simply wrong. Indeed, the authors paid no attention to the large portions of my recent book that explain what we know about factors that make resort to suicide terrorist campaigns more or less likely, and how we know it. Hence, this letter is mainly devoted to updating Ashworth, Clinton, Meirowitz, and Ramsay on my work. I also make a few comments about the general question of whether concerns about "sample bias" should carry significant weight when dealing with the complete universe of a phenomenon, as is the case in my work on suicide terrorism.

The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has wrongly promoted the view that the United States, as the leader of a unipolar system, can pursue such a policy without fear of serious opposition. The most consequential effect of the Bush strategy will be a fundamental transformation in how major states perceive the United States and how they react to future uses of U.S. power. Major powers are already engaging in the early stages of balancing behavior against the United States, by adopting "soft-balancing" measures that do not directly challenge U.S. military preponderance but use international institutions, economic statecraft, and diplomatic arrangements to delay, frustrate, and undermine U.S. policies. If the Bush administration continues to pursue aggressive unilateral military policies, increased soft balancing could establish the basis for hard balancing against the United States. To avoid this outcome, the United States should renounce the systematic use of preventive war, as well as other aggressive unilateral military policies, and return to its traditional policy governing the use of force-a case-by-case calculation of costs and benefits.