In the deadliest attack of its kind since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in April 2003, a suicide bomber killed 114 in Baghdad yesterday when he lured civilians to his vehicle with promises of work, then detonated a bomb.

A survivor said that in the midst of the chaos caused by the explosion, it was "raining blood."

In July, the Washington Post reported that around 400 suicide bombings had taken place in Iraq since the start of the war–four times the number carried out in Israel as part of the Palestinian conflict since 1993.

In the context of the so-called "war on terror," there is of course something uniquely disturbing about confronting an enemy whose instinct for self-preservation is so completely subjugated to other motivations. In international relations theory, we learn that states are rational actors that seek first of all survival, and then the maximization of their power. Policies to maintain international equilibrium can then be fashioned upon that notion. Some even argue, reductio ad absurdum, that the most stable, peaceful world possible is one in which every state possesses nuclear weapons and thus deters the other from military aggression absolutely.

Neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, in a rousing speech that can be read essentially as an apologia for the war in Iraq, gets it right when he explains that the logic of deterrence, which governed foreign policy in the Cold War world, doesn’t apply to such an enemy–"deterrence does not work against people who ache for heaven," he writes. What he fails to recognize, however, is what has become obvious for anyone not encumbered by ideological blinders–any "war" against fundamentalist Islamic terrorism cannot be fought primarily by recourse to traditional military action against states.

In an essay titled "Why They Do It" in this month’s New York Review of Books, Christian Caryl undertakes, on the basis of his review of recent literature on the subject, to identify who suicide bombers are and what are their motivations. Some of his findings contradict the conventional wisdom that these terrorists are motivated primarily by a belief in the Islamic fundamentalist promise of a martyr’s reward in paradise (contra Krauthammer’s commentary):

In all but a few cases suicide terrorists are acting in the name of organizations conducting campaigns designed to achieve specific political goals…. Virtually all the organizations that have used suicide attacks have been fighting to evict an occupying power from a national homeland. Usually the conflicts are extremely "asymmetric" (to use the current jargon), with the occupier enjoying vast superiority on weaponry and resources.

According to Robert Pape, whom Caryl cites, religion "functions as merely an aggravating factor."

Nor do they tend to be personally desperate and prone to suicidal tendencies even in the absence of a political cause:

One revelation is that the image of the suicide terrorist as a dead-ender couldn’t be less accurate. Many of those who undertake suicide missions are above the norm in schooling and income. As Perfect Soldiers, the careful investigation of the September 11 hijackers by the Los Angeles Times reporter Terry McDermott, shows, the four pilots were all upper-middle-class Arabs who had come to Europe to attend universities. Mohamed Atta, the attack ringleader, was the son of a Cairo lawyer who defended a master’s thesis in urban planning at his Hamburg university. (Some of the sources I interviewed in Hamburg in the fall of 2001 told me that Atta’s German was so good that he liked to correct the grammatical errors of native speakers.)

That overwhelming military force is not effective against suicide terrorism, for those without the common sense to recognize it, is being made manifest by events in a Iraq. This is likely due to the vast numbers of civilian casualties:

A review of the records and accounts of over 180 Palestinian suicide bombers confirmed that close to half of them—and a larger number during the years of the Al-Aqsa Intifada—embarked on their suicide missions shortly after they had lost a very close person.

Some potential policy recommendations are implied by Caryl’s analysis:

And that, of course, begs the question—how do you defeat them? By killing them? But they want to be killed. By far the most important countermeasure, of course, is advance information—not only broad analysis of terrorist strategy but tactical intelligence about their organization and immediate plans—the latter, in particular, something Americans do not seem particularly good at, thanks to their scandalous deficiencies in language skills and lack of close knowledge of regional life as well as their difficulties in infiltrating terrorist cells. … When using military force is advisable, he stresses that civilian casualties have to be avoided at all costs.