Corn says that there is a "significant financial incentive for the family of the “martyr” — the $25,000 reward offered by the Saudis to families of Palestinian suicide-bombers being the equivalent of $600,000 in the West in terms of purchasing power."

He does not give a source for this claim.  Does anyone know of a report along these lines and maybe, a link to it? 

That reminds me of business plan I came up with guaranteed to make me the big dollars.

First, come up with something you can sell to the Chinese for a ten dollar profit.

Second, sell it to just 10% of the Chinese.

I thought I had a winner, but the VC funding passed me up for the guy with the eleven dollar plan. [Apolgies to Steve Martin and There's Something About Mary].

I included the populations of the neigboring Co.s Monaghan, Cavan, and Donegal in the Republic in my estimate...

Tony Corn longs to become the George F. Kennan of "World War IV," otherwise known as the West's response to the jihadi threat.  But whereas Kennan wrote his 1946 "Long Telegram" from the belly of the beast, Corn writes from a State Department backwater which studies a fading Latin Europe.

Salazar's Portugal and Franco's Spain were both military dictatorships.  Corn understands their democratization to have been the result of a modernization and liberalization of their military officer corps.  He claims that these militaries acted as the stabilizing social force as the countries transitioned to democracy.

It should not, then, be surprising that Corn, influenced by his readings in recent Iberohistory, would recommend that we support and reach out to the Muslim militaries and instruct them in their democratizing roles.  How that is to be accomplished is not made clear.  Indeed, how we could ever trust that these Muslim militaries wouldn't go over to the jihadi side is made no clearer.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This has to be one of the funnier lines in recent public policy prose:

  The challenge for the West can hardly be overestimated

But, hey, just watch me. 

I can do better than Mr. Corn, though. Suppose only two percent were....

I can't believe anybody would publish such drivel.

I was just wondering about this very question. The discussion upthread about the size of the IRA was very helpful.  Does anybody know the numbers for other terrorist organizations? 

I read too many blogs to remember where I saw this, but the person who said remarked that al qaeda mostly consists of uneducated hangers-on.  The downside of using madrassas as indoctrination centers is that the students don't learn anything useful.
 
As soon as they lucked into an engineer willing to suicide who could calculate the energy contained in a fully fueled jumbojet, they used him up.

It astounds me that this threat is being taken as seriously, if not more seriously, than the Soviet threat was.  Not so much that the president is trying to do so, as that it is working. Digby has a theory about that:

Of course we all felt real fear in the early days, none so much as those who lived in New York and DC. It was almost unbelievable to see those scenes. But there was a sense of spectacle and drama about it that was <span>literally</span&gt unreal to those of us who watched it on television. This was fear put to music, with dramatic title treatments and a soaring voice-over. Because of that, on some level, 9/11 was a thrill for many people, even some Democrats. It was sad and horrifying, of course, but it was also stimulating, exciting and memorable because of the way it was presented on television. (When we were talking about this, Jane described it as if "the whole country was watching porn together every time the rerun of the towers falling was broadcast.") And we subsequently fetishized the "war on terrorism" to the point where some people become inexplicably excited whenever it is mentioned. They want that big group grope again, that sense of shared sensation. That is the "fear" that people say they have. And it's why they want to vote for the guy who keeps pumping it into the body politic.

(He's wrong about the fear in New York business, though.  We all stayed. We were grim, but not fearful.) 

"The evidence suggests that a fair number of people can be persuaded to suicide bomb in the interests of combatting an occupying army (in, for example, Israel or Iraq or Sri Lanka) but that only a vanishingly small number of people are inclined to mount these kind of attacks against the western homeland, not withstanding pretty high levels of generally anti-American views."

I think MY has been reading Robert Pape

...those are meaningless number games.

I'm far more concerned over some different numbers: 27, 7, and 1.  The first is the number of amendments that have been made to the consitution, which I fear may be destroyed.  The second is the number of articles of the constitution, and the third is the number of people our current administration seems to believe should be in the body that governs our country.  Compared to this threat, the terrorism we are constantly threatened with seems like a rather paltry thing.

Much as you may think it true, George Bush is just *not* an existential threat to the US, the Constitution or much of anything else important.  Hell, he's not even an existential threat to Social Security.

Sure, it's generous to call him a halfwit, and he's a really crappy president, but everything's not off to hell in a handbasket, and Islamic terrorism really is a bigger threat to the world than George Bush. 

One could look within America for a risk far greater than Islamic Suicide Jihadists. 9/11 killed approximately 3,000 innocent Americans. Since that date, approximately 60,000 Americans have been murdered in this country. Yet hardly a word about this is mentioned. Frankly, our risk of getting killed by a fellow American is far, far,far greater than from a suicide bombing. Yet we go crazy over the smaller threat because it is something we don't understand. Murder is something that Americans understand. We may not like it but we tolerate it. Consequently, we will end up spending trillions of dollars and countless soldiers lives on the WOT to ameliorate a miniscule risk.