Random threat chatter

Whenever possible always fight wars on the enemies soil not your own backyard.

You don't know me from Eve, but I found you through a friend of a friend (me -> phredward -> gleemie -> you) and I like your politics (I'm also a fairly left-of-center American crossed with a slightly right-of-center Israeli) so I hope you don't mind if I friend you.

Oh yes, my name is actually Maayan. The username is a (bad) joke about what I do for a living. Hi!

Well... I'm a robotics grad student. But there are days when it feels less like engineering and more like psychology.

Heh.. Some of each, of course.

I'm at Carnegie Mellon, in the Robotics Institute. I work on communication for multi-agent teams. Right now, I'm not doing anything with physical robots -- it's all in simulation. I'm hoping to keep it that way (I'm a 5th-year and I'd like to graduate some time this decade) but my advisors aren't so sure.

> I guess that Iraq has been good at drawing fire, if nothing else.

This has gotten me thinking.

I saw a report about suicide bombers that seems to imply that occupying a country actually creates more suicide bombers. Basically, suicide bombings happen in response to, and only in response to, foreign occupation, and if the suicide bomber wasn't doing the suicide bombing, they'd probably be, you know, doing the local equivalent of hanging out mopily and listening to The Smiths, or whatever depressed kids do.

It's one report, though pretty well-surveyed, but I haven't seen any other reputable reports or studies on it. Also, it was just about suicide bombers, not terrorist attacks in general, so it may not be that important. I wish I had a link. Lemme see if I can find it.

The idea, though, that going after terrorists creates more terrorism is kind of the opposite of the "draw fire to Iraq" idea (which kind of assumes or implies there's a limited amount of terrorism, which will happen in one place or another)

Here we go:

http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html

It's published in a magazine for anti-war conservatives. The survey was made by Robert Pape at the University of Chicago.

That makes sense, yeah. I also just thought it was a really interesting article that you'd like to see.