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Ok, let's look at the evidence.

As stated in the OP:

While religion contributes in many cases to increased feelings of loyalty toward a kindred community that may be oceans away from an individual’s country of citizenship, the primary cause of these horrible phenomena is foreign occupation.

Are the suicide bombings in Iraq primarily because there is a foreign occupation, or primarily because Saudis have a death wish (compared to Iraqis)?

Let's see the numbers of suicide attacks in Iraq, the numbers carried out by Saudis rather than Iraqis (and please show who is reporting or what the source of the nationalities of the suicide bombers are), and who they are targetting.

The attacks against Shia shrines etc are indeed +not+ because of the foreign occupation - I'll grant you this (I won't even argue that they are indirectly because of the occupation.. let's keep it simple).

Let's examine the proportions of attacks which are because of the occupation and those which aren't.

Over to you eh.

(Note that Pape's data set is more than just Iraq - but lets look at Iraq and suicide attacks there. I presume it is fair to say they started only after the invasion?)

Cheers,
Shafique

We'll first look at whether Saudis (Saudi Arabia has a population similar in size to Iraq - though her number of Sunni Muslims is larger) make up more suicide bombings in Iraq than actual Iraqis.

The evidence and conclusions by analysts and the US military is that there have been more Saudi suicide bombers in Iraq than Iraqi suicide bombers. The analysts (including Pape) are saying there are ideological (religious) reasons for why Saudis are flocking to Iraq to become martyrs and fight Jihad:

There's widespread agreement that Saudis are represented more heavily than any other nationality among the bombers, said Assaf Moghadem, a research fellow at Harvard University who studies suicide bombers' motivations. Insurgent groups sometimes recruit Saudis because of their relative prosperity, he said.

The ultra-conservative brand of Sunni Islam that's prevalent in Saudi Arabia also accounts for the large number of Saudis who participate in suicide bombings and the insurgency in Iraq, said Mike Davis, a University of California at Irvine professor who wrote a recent history of car bombs.

"The religious current in modern Islam that encourages this kind of sectarian attitude toward the Shiites is the religious orthodoxy enshrined in Saudi Arabia," Davis said.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2007/08/08/1 ... z1ZIC7x7N0

Thanks - can we see some numbers for the nationalities of the suicide bombers in Iraq and what the sources for this info are. The above snippet is quite general - 'widespread agreement' seems to imply that there some real evidence underlying the assertion.

Please quantify the 'large number of Saudis'.

I think the quote has merit - the Wahabbi extremist ideology in Saudi does indeed encourage anti-Shia attitudes and could very well account for a lot of the anti-Shia suicide bombings in Iraq.

Let's quantify that.

Then let's look at the suicide bombings against the foreign occupiers. Numbers eh, numbers.

Cheers,
Shafique