Breaking News: Bombing of UN Headquarters in Baghdad

A car drove up to the UN compound in Baghdad Monday morning, and as it was trying to enter, it exploded. It killed at least two people and wounded a dozen or so.

Some reporters assume that suicide bombings equal al-Qaeda or at least religious fanatics. But as Bob Pape of the University of Chicago points out in an excellent op-ed today in the NYT, most suicide bombers have belonged to secular parties, as with the Marxist Eelam Tigers among the Tamils. So this m.o. doesn't really tell you anything.

The last such bombing at the UN was carried out with old Soviet Baath munitions, and it is likely that the Sunni Arab nationalists just want to get the UN out, and to make the point to the UN that trying to rescue Bush in Iraq would be a very, very bad idea. All this on the eve of Bush's address to the UN.


http://www.upi.com/view.cfm
?StoryID=20030922-084252-9838r

Pape's piece is not on the Web free, but see Mark Clayton's account of his theories at the CSM:


http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/
0902/p18s01-lehl.html?entryBottomStory