Professor Pape: "Ron Paul has the right foreign policy to safeguard America"

University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape, foremost expert on suicide terrorism, has joined the Ron Paul team as foreign policy advisor. According to this interview, Professor Pape says:

Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004.
...
The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
...
Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

The rest of the interview is enlightening and worth a read.

Businesswire notes two more additions to the Ron Paul team:

Middle East expert Leon Hadar and national security analyst Ivan Eland have also joined the Ron Paul campaign as foreign policy advisors.

Leon Hadar is a Washington-based global affairs analyst whose commentary on U.S. foreign policy has been published in leading newspapers and foreign policy journals. A former UN correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, he is the author of Quagmire: America in the Middle East and Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.

Ivan Eland is senior fellow and director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He is the author of several books, including The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed.

Perhaps the good doctor knows what he's talking about after all--but neocons are too busy smirking to notice.