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LSE: US military support increases terror attacks on American citizens

In the very week that bin Laden was located and killed - and American jubilation and a seeming notion that security for the US is now greater than before - comes a report from no lesser place than the London School of Economics which concludes that US military support for some regimes has only help to increased terror attacks on Americans.

"US military support for foreign governments encourages terrorist groups to attack Americans, demonstrates a new study from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Essex.

Terrorist attacks on Americans are more likely to come from countries where the US provides military aid, stations troops and sells arms finds the study - the first to show a statistical correlation between American foreign policy and terrorism against its citizens.

The paper, 'Foreign terror on Americans', is published in the new edition of the Journal of Peace Research and explores the systematic patterns which appear to govern terrorist action. The authors are professor Eric Neumayer, from LSE, and professor Thomas Plümper, from the University of Essex.

They examined details of terorist attacks by foreigners on Americans between 1978 and 2005 to establish not only their number but also the country from which the action originated. Anti-American attacks were carried out by people from 91 different countries and 568 US citizens were killed (for the 9/11 attacks, only victims in aeroplanes were included).

The authors devised a statistical analysis of the figures. They estimated the effect of the level of US involvement (military aid, arms exports and troops stationed there) in each country – adjusted for that nation's overall military strength – on the number of attacks originating from each country as well as the number of Americans killed. Their model showed that US military support had substantively strong effects on foreign terror on Americans: a significant rise on the measure of military aid (equal in statistical terms to a one standard deviation change) increased anti-American terrorism by 135 per cent. The same rise in arms exports corresponded to an increase in terrorism of 109 per cent and of 24 per cent in the case of military personnel."

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