Last week former Senator Edwards, seeking to link the fight against world poverty to the more politically salient security paradigm, echoed what a number of well-intentioned humanitarians have espoused. Edwards—who is not the first to make this argument (others include Howard Dean and President Bush) but has certainly raised its profile—argued that poverty sewed the seeds of terrorism while failed states and societies played host to terrorists. Yesterday the Union Leader dismissed Edwards’s “quasi-Marxist” remarks arguing “terrorism is fueled by ideology.”

But ideology alone offers little by way of explanatory power—it comes up short, for example, in accounting for the motives of the terrorists who pioneered suicide bombings, the Tamil Tigers (whom Robert Pape uses as the textbook example of how occupation fuels terrorism). However, terrorism analyst Peter Bergen and grand strategist Michael Lind offer a more durable and flexible lens (access without password here) through which to understand the roots of terrorism: humiliation.

Bergen and Lind too initially seek to debunk the deprivation thesis and in its place offer a more holistic look at terrorism that is fueled by a narrative of humiliation and a set of grievances. The humiliation theory captures a broader set of motivations and can derive from many sources—through occupation, political manipulation, dictatorial repression, military defeat, and even sometimes via economic conditions like poverty and unemployment that create a sense of despair, frustration, and anger. Certainly ideologies (remembering to disaggregate the divergent and often competing ideologies that motivate various terrorists) play a role but when Bin Laden or Nasrallah are holding forth for their audiences, they are not appealing to their sense of ideological conviction but rather their experience of humiliation by invoking subjects like the Palestinian plight, the Iraqi occupation, or historic marginalization. And addressing some of these grievances to undermine terrorists’ appeal and their tacit support has to be a part of an effective counter-terrorism strategy.

While Bergen and Lind do not mine this further, the evidence pointing to the economic dimensions of humiliation merit attention. Basel Saleh published a study that found a statistically significant causal relationship between economic conditions in the Occupied Territories and Palestinian terrorism during the Oslo process. It essentially concluded that while poor economic conditions alone may not fuel terrorism, combined with a political grievance against an identifiable actor (the occupying Israel Defense Forces) regression analysis closely linked dwindling economic conditions to rises in terrorist incidents. However, Saleh’s findings still fit under the broader mantle of humiliation and prove the economic background to be a vital part of the equation.

But a far graver humiliation for the Arab and Muslim world beyond economic stagnation has been the elephant in the room that few Presidential candidates are willing to mention—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Middle East Scholar Shibley Telhami’s analysis of a most recent Zogby poll of six Arab states concludes that the most important action the United States can take to change its image in the eyes of the Middle East is to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Arguably such a single foreign policy maneuver would go farther than anything else to redress humiliation and fight terrorism.

Nick Kristof raised the stakes in his Sunday op-ed challenging Presidential candidates and politicians alike to advocate on behalf of both Israelis and Palestinians for the resumption of negotiations and a peace process. But even Kristof undersells the powerful signal a peace deal would send to the rest of the Arab and Islamic world and its secondary effects in the fight against jihadist terrorists.

The logical corollary to Bergen and Lind’s humiliation theory is a package of foreign policy initiatives that can begin to redress this humiliation. Certainly promoting an Arab-Israeli peace process would be the most potent. But Edwards’s prescription for economic aid is not to be discounted. The fact that Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world did not allow al Qaeda to take root. But a preponderance of evidence indicates that our underwhelming provision of economic and reconstruction aid to rebuild a war-torn and already poverty-stricken country allowed for the current resurgence of the Taliban, which has now effectively merged with al Qaeda.

Though Senator Edwards’s explanation of poverty does simplify a more complex set of causes fueling terrorism around the world, it certainly begins to unravel part of the story of humiliation and grievances and offers a far more instructive and constructive narrative than one of “Islamofacism” that can do no more than usher in the self-fulfilling prophecy of a clash of civilizations.