Why jihadists target the West

Another way to look at what is happening is "two camps working in parallel," Mr. Ranstorp says, "one confronting the 'near enemy,' as we saw in Egypt," where operations are carried out in core Muslim countries that are key to the struggle, "and another confronting the 'far enemy,' led by the US, and primarily because of its support for the godless Arab and other Muslim regimes."

The "what-we-do vs. who-we-are" debate over the extremists' motivations pits scholars like the Frenchman Olivier Roy, author of "Globalized Islam," against experts like Mr. Cole; former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s; and the University of Chicago's Robert Pape. The principal petri dish in which their views have formed is the war in Iraq.

For Mr. Roy, a sociologist at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, it is a vision of a dominant global Islam at war with a democratic and globalizing West that drives Islamist extremists. In that context, he says, Iraq is a convenient propaganda tool for recruiting young Muslims, including their Westernized and disaffected brethren, but it is not central to the Islamist ideology.

On the other hand, Mr. Pape says in his new book, "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," that it is not so much religion but US policy that drives Islamist violence. He concludes that the presence of US forces in Muslim countries, as in Iraq, increases the likelihood of another 9/11.

One problem with faulting policies is that it doesn't explain why stances that have long been unpopular in the Muslim world did not result in violence before now. "For a long time, some of our policies have angered people in the region - such as decades of support of Israel - and that didn't spark the kind of violence we're seeing today," says Martha Crenshaw, a terror expert at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

Like Ranstorp, Professor Crenshaw sees something closer to a combination of the two explanations for the violence. "This is not a spontaneous attraction of anti-American values, but a continuity that in some eyes, for example those of some young Muslim men, is being verified," she says. "In effect they are seeing an ideology that seems more and more right because of events - such as the US going in to Iraq."

Michigan's Professor Cole says he agrees that the Iraq war is "irrelevant" to the leaders who formulate and profess the Islamist ideology, but he says it is not at all irrelevant to the local constituencies that would act as the leaders' foot soldiers.

"The ideology is a kind of software that can be installed in certain people's minds," he says. "The question is whether we are helping or hurting the recruitment drive."

It may be that the young Muslim men who are willing to carry bombs for a cause are not so much full of hatred of Western values, but disappointed that they have been drawn to them - only to find, whether they are in Cairo or Leeds, England, that the door is shut. In any case, says Cole, the war in Iraq is "poor" counterterrorism. In his view, it is creating more foot soldiers for global Jihad rather than fewer.

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