Roots of anti-Americanism

Roots of anti-Americanism

Four years later, we repeat what we should have known all along:

But the really interesting part was this: he ran regressions on nine different families of variables - everything from education to gender to religiosity to income - to find out what best explained expressions of support for terrorism. None of these shows any stasticially significant relationship. The only independent variables significantly correlated with support for terrorism were "negative views of U.S. foreign policy" and - and here's the interesting part - "negative views of one's own political system."

Discontent with their own government was vastly more significant than religion, education, culture, class, or anything else for explaining support for terrorism against the U.S. Which offers some really interesting support for the idea that there is a clear American interest in promoting reform in such countries - even if Greg Gause is right that doing so will not itself end terrorism.

So the so-called Arab Street blames us for propping up the House of Saud as well as the House of Sharon. Interesting...