The Toronto Star had a veritable festival of discussion on this topic this past Sunday -- namely, why would li'l old Canada be at risk of a terrorist attack?

There was an entirely predictable left/right pseudo bunfight between Linda McQuaig (port) and Rondi Adamson (starboard).

For example, McQuaig wrote this:

In the official, mainstream view of terrorism -- the view trumpeted by western governments, think tanks and media commentators -- terrorists are freedom-loathing zealots with an irrational hatred of our western lifestyle and culture.

But another view, polls suggest, is gaining ground with the public: Terrorism is actually a response to military interventions perpetrated by western governments.

Adamson wrote this:

Canadians would do well to look at the mountain of evidence -- attacks from Islamist murderers throughout the world for the past nearly four decades, long before the war in Iraq. Canadians would do well to remember the loud and clear messages Islamist murderers routinely send in the form of various acts of violence; the loud and clear messages they send in the murder of their fellow Muslims, and, in that most depraved recent incident in Iraq, the slaughter of Muslim children as they collected candy from American soldiers.

These last points are of the utmost relevance. For one fact often missed in the maelstrom is that this war is in one part a battle for our civilization against jihadists, but in another part a battle for the soul of Islam -- a civil war between Muslims who would live reasonably, and others who would bring back the Caliphate. Any country with a growing Muslim population, such as Canada, is already part of that battle. Mind you, this point will be moot if we've completely surrendered before the attack on Canadian soil comes.

The Star needs a third person in this case to say where both are right and both are wrong.

McQuaig, to be honest, is a bit closer to my worldview, but I think she has a habit of leaving out incovenient facts.

Or maybe she just didn't have access to to the July 3 article by Boston Globe writer Christopher Shea on Robert Pape's book Dying To Win: The Strategic Logic of Terrorism (Random House) -- a book she cites in her piece -- republished in the Sunday Star.

McQuaig quotes Pape as follows: "(W)hat nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland."

However, she doesn't say that Pape has also found that suicide bombings tend to occur most when the occupiers and the occupied are of different religious backgrounds (additional note: Pape's research looked at bombings conducted between 1980 and 2001; we appear to be into a different ball game now. McQuaig doesn't mention that time frame).

An excerpt:

Research from other scholars backs up this point. David Laitin, a Stanford University expert on civil wars, and Eli Berman, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, have demonstrated that while only 18 per cent of the 114 civil wars since 1945 have pitted members of one religious group against another, fully 90 per cent of suicide attacks take place in inter-religious conflicts.

Laitin and Berman, too, view suicide terrorism as following impeccable game-theory logic: When your targets are ''hard" and the enemy is wealthy, well armed, and possessed of good intelligence, they write, suicide bombing begins to make sense as a strategy.

However, Diego Gambetta, an Oxford University sociologist and the editor of ''Making Sense of Suicide Missions," thinks these claims of rationality among self-immolators go a bit too far. First, do the attacks achieve as much as Pape contends? Israel had already committed to pulling out of the West Bank under the Oslo accords when a fresh wave of attacks came in 1994 and 1995. Far from causing the withdrawal, he argues, the attacks may in fact have heightened Israeli resistance to it.

Then there's the question of Islam. There may be non-Islamic suicide bombers, Gambetta writes. But ''we do not have even a single case of a non-Islamic faith justifying" suicide missions.

Gambetta makes a tentative cultural-historical argument, tracing the suicidal impulse in the Middle East back to the Iran-Iraq war, when thousands of fundamentalist Iranian soldiers marched into certain death against Iraqi tank formations. That strain of self-sacrifice then spread into Lebanon and Palestine and now Iraq, through a badly understood dynamic.

But the point Shea's piece makes is we still don't definitively know why suicide bombings take place, but while there are conflicting theories, we're getting closer to an answer.

McQuaig wrote:

British Prime Minister Tony Blair went to great lengths last week to suggest that the recent London bombings weren't connected to Britain's role in the occupation of Iraq, but rather to irrational hatred of western culture.

Really?

If you attack your neighbour, kill several of his family members, ransack his house and steal his car, is it logical to conclude that your neighbour is in a rage against you because he doesn't like how you dress and what movies you enjoy watching?

That would make sense if a group of Iraqis who have suffered grieviously at the hands of British troops had somehow gotten themselves into Britain and then killed themselves and as many Britons as they could in a combination act of revenge and political statement.

But it wasn't Iraqis -- even expatriate ones -- who committed the bombings: It was three young British-born Muslim men of Pakistani descent who had become radicalized who carried out the July 7 bombing, along with one Jamaican-born British man who had also become a radical Muslim.

This is a significant shift: These were the first domestic suicide bombers in British history.

Frankly, it's more like you being an asshole to your neighbor, who is of a different religion than you. And in response, people of the same religion as him commit mass murder against people they presume are just like you.

McQuaig can argue they did it because Britain participated in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Now, following McQuaig's argument, let's say to stop the suicide bombings, Britain does withdraw from Iraq.

Why wouldn't radical Muslims see that as a victory for their tactics, and if they have global aims, why wouldn't they continue to use suicide bombing as a tactic to advance those aims?

Some early debate about 9/11 focused on how Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda's leader, was contemptuous about how weak the U.S. appeared in Somalia in 1993, pulling out after losing 18 soldiers in the famous Battle of Mogadishu.

Here's a few other excerpts of Pape's 2003 paper (the precursor to the book) from a July 13 posting at the Bush Beat blog at the Village Voice:

• Suicide terrorism has increased during the past 20 years "because terrorists have learned that it pays."

• Suicide terrorism "relies on the threat to inflict low to medium levels of punishment on civilians." The more ambitious the level of horror attempted, the less successful the terrorist campaign's organizers are.

• "The most promising way to contain suicide terrorism is to reduce terrorists' confidence in their ability to carry out such attacks on the target society. States that face persistent suicide terrorism should recognize that neither offensive military action nor concessions alone are likely to do much good and should invest significant resources in border defenses and other means of homeland security."

Now, to Adamson.

Every time I read her, I plaintively wonder, "when is Rick Anderson coming back?"

That aside, her piece is just fear-mongering and an attempt to kiss the ass of the Canadian military.

For one thing, she doesn't address the question of why we haven't been domestically attacked yet -- Canadian troops started participating in the Afghanistan mission in March 2002. To date, the U.S. has killed more of our troops than the Taliban has.

You could conclude from that if you want to minimize casualties while at war, just don't go fight as an American ally. :)

One point that neither Adamson nor McQuaig address about the London bombing is how Muslims there aren't as well integrated as they are in Canada.

By all accounts, Britain, once you get outside of London, is far less welcoming to newcomers who aren't of similar skin colour to existing Britons.

Second-generation Muslims, of the type that carried out the July 7 and 21 attacks, are feeling particularly alienated. If you have a large enough pool of alienated people, a few mass murderers might emerge from it.

Adamson wrote the following:

... One fact often missed in the maelstrom is that this war is in one part a battle for our civilization against jihadists, but in another part a battle for the soul of Islam — a civil war between Muslims who would live reasonably, and others who would bring back the Caliphate. Any country with a growing Muslim population, such as Canada, is already part of that battle. Mind you, this point will be moot if we've completely surrendered before the attack on Canadian soil comes.

And make no mistake, the attack will come. If there were a Palestine alongside Israel tomorrow, if there were no American troops anywhere outside the United States, if there were no more slights, real or imagined, jihadists would still be coming to get us.

By giving even the slightest credibility to the argument that the U.S. and Britain are targets because of their foreign policy, and that therefore Canada is safe, we are allowing the jihadists to dictate our decisions and keep us in a dangerous dream world a while longer. And above all, we are helping the wrong side in the battle for Islam.

Maybe Adamson should give some thought to the possibility that U.S. and British foreign policy is helping the bad Islamists, and not the good Muslims.

As I've argued before, maybe we need to think about how we shrink the potential pool of radicals by not alienating moderate Muslims.

Right now, Iraq is doing more to develop terrorist expertise than the Afghanistan training camps ever did. Young jihadis are streaming there, eager to help drive out the infidels. We're creating a larger and larger pool of experienced, hardened killers. How does that help make us safer?

As I've posted before, terrorist incidents world-wide tripled since between 2003 -- when the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq happened -- and 2004.

Adamson is technically right in her claim that acceding to everything on the Islamist wish list won't eliminate the risk of terror attacks.

But on balance, I think things would be better if there were five angry, fanatical Islamists plotting against the Crusaders of  The True North Strong and Free -- and not 500 or 5,000.

Finally, Gwynne Dyer argued there is a cause-and-effect in his commentary on Sunday. An excerpt:

Let's talk dirty. The 9/11 suicide hijackers -- all Arabs -- attacked the U.S. instead of Brazil or Japan because the U.S. government has been neck-deep in the politics of the Arab world for a generation, whereas the Brazilian and Japanese governments haven't. There is a connection between Washington's Mideast policies -- its support for oppressive Arab regimes, its military interventions in the region, and its uncritical backing for Israeli government policies -- and the fact that Americans have become the preferred targets for Islamist terrorist attacks.

Indeed, no other non-Muslim nation except Israel was a target for Islamist terrorist attacks until after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the attacks since then have been aimed at the citizens of countries that were complicit in that invasion: Londoners, not Parisians; Spaniards, not Germans; Australians holidaying in Bali, not Japanese holidaying in Malaysia.

There you have it: two full paragraphs of obscenity. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself says so. He informed us last Tuesday that any attempt to link the terrorist attacks in London to his decision to follow the Bush administration in invading Iraq was "an obscenity."

That's nonsense. All the comments in the first two paragraphs of this article are about cause and effect. You may agree or disagree with the analysis, but discussions of cause and effect are still permissible and even necessary. So how does Blair -- and President George W. Bush in Washington, and Prime Minister John Howard in Canberra — get away with forbidding us to talk about what is causing all this?

The key technique is to claim that any attempt to explain why these attacks are happening is also an attempt to condone and justify them.

The Star has potentially found its third voice! :)

Although I should say Dyer didn't mention the taking of Japanese hostages in Iraq as punishment for the deployment of Japanese troops there in a humanitarian capacity.