Iraq attacks are 54.8% of global suicide terrorist attacks- since 1981 (USMA West Point report)

[underpants]

28 page PDF file here
http://ctc.usma.edu/sentinel/CTCSentinel-Vol2Iss1.pdf

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/14/iraq-attacks-account-for-more-than-half-of-global-terrorism-since-1981/

In an analysis of trends in suicide attacks worldwide since 1981 (pdf), researcher Assaf Moghadam presents a pretty shocking statistic:

Iraq accounts for 1,067 suicide attacks in the period under review — “a number that accounts for more than half (54.8%) of all suicide attacks since 1981. The sheer volume in which this tactic has struck Iraq is even more impressive since no suicide attacks were recorded in Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

[Chulanowa]

1. The suicide attack is the weapon of people who have nothing to live for

Anyone who wonders at the Iraqis topping the list, is probably someone who only started paying attention to Iraq in 2003.

Right now in Iraq, there is an entire generation that has known nothing except constant war, crushing poverty, and brutal repression. Thirty year-olds who's every waking moment has been the Iran war, the Gulf war, sanctions and smothered uprisings, then the Iraq war. Twenty years of that time period, they have been seeing friends and family die of cancers and degenerative diseases that are so rare in the west that we don't have names for the conditions. They've seen their own children born with deformities that would shock P.T. Barnum, again, and again, and again.

Our invasion was the final blow to the collective psyche of Iraq. It's like we teased them with freedom from Saddam, and punched them in the gut every time they reached for it. We wiped out an entire city, because criminal mercenaries we bankrolled were killed there. We continue using all the same weapons that are causing all those cancers and deformities, poisoning the new generations. We force the Iraqi "government", pretty much at gunpoint, to sell its agricultural rights and heritage to Montsanto. Iraqis who pick up the paper see stories of US troops getting sick and dying too, because of the sewer water we tell them to drink, the DU rounds they are told to use, and the unsafe and - for women in particular - barbaric environment they live in. And those Iraqis ask, if this is how we treat our soldiers, then how are we planning to treat the Iraqis?

I'd be more surprised if iraqi suicide bombers were rare.