I don't think my argument necessarily undercuts the democratization strategy. I should also acknowledge that my thinking on this is strongly influenced by Jonathan Shay's
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.
It's possible to accept the notion that an important root cause of terrorism is a sense of victimization and a sense of the abuse of justice and honor (which is a central theme of Shay's work, since the Iliad opens with an aborted fragging of a commanding officer who violated a subordinate's sense of justice), while at the same time seeing democratization and its consequences as a tool to get at those root causes. Following the metaphor of "letting it burn out" -- for that approach to work, you have to make sure there aren't additional sources of ignition that will restart the fire at another spot. It may be that the individual cases have to burn themselves out, but democratization (or more generally, increasing the levels of justice within a society) dampen things down overall and prevent reignition in the minds of other individuals. That permits a shift from a large-scale military strategy to an individually-focused law enforcement strategy. (Occasional mass murderers will always be with us, but organized groups of them need not be.)
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