Why America is hated: An alternate view of 9/11 and U.S. foreign policy

Great piece:

The subject is taboo. Few have raised the question in this country during the 10 years since the Twin Towers were destroyed. Namely, were the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. the result of simmering Arab hatred of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East? Or did the 9/11 hijackers just hate us “for our freedoms,” as George W. Bush asserted?

Shortly after 9/11, one of our leading newspapers echoed the official line by stating that the perpetrators acted out of “hatred for values cherished in the West such as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism, and universal suffrage.” (New York Times, Sept. 16, 2001). This was, and continues to be, a comforting notion for many Americans, since it makes U.S. actions irrelevant and allows us to view ourselves as innocent victims. The media continue to repeat the mantra: “They are freedom- and democracy-hating Islamofascists, religious fanatics, etc.,” who have no regard for the values we cherish.

There is a problem with this comforting theory: It is demonstrably false. If the 9/11 perpetrators truly acted out of “hatred for freedom, prosperity, tolerance, etc.,” why didn’t they attack, say, Sweden or Norway — rich, progressive, democratic nations? More to the point, we have abundant evidence from Osama bin Laden himself of the motives for the 9/11 attacks. Several interviews of him over the years by experts on the Middle East show that he harbored deep resentment against foreign armies invading Muslim countries, which is why he joined the Afghan mujahedeen in their 10-year struggle against the Soviet Union (ironically, with American help from our CIA.) Later, bin Laden came to hate the U.S. — for our building permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia (site of the holiest of Muslim shrines) in 1990; for our support of corrupt and repressive regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and — especially — for our support of Israel’s invasions and killing of civilians in Lebanon (we give Israel $3 billion a year in military aid and they don’t carry out any significant military action without U.S. blessing) and for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements in the West Bank, and its brutal treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

In 2004 the Washington Post published a message from bin Laden, released by the U.S. government: “ the events that affected my soul... started in 1982, when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon... I couldn’t forget those scenes — blood, severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere... high rises demolished... and the whole world saw and didn’t respond... and as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that that we should punish the oppressor in kind... destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted...”

Bin Laden’s views are widely shared by wealthy Muslims (bankers, professionals, businessmen), with close ties to the U.S. (opinion survey, Wall Street Journal.) If even the Muslim wealthy classes are offended by our policies, it is not hard to imagine how suicide bombers emerge from the Arab poor, living in desperation and hopelessness, who feel the brunt of U.S./Israeli oppression on a daily basis.

For a short time after 9/11 we enjoyed the world’s sympathy. But instead of looking inward and honestly exploring the question “Why were WE attacked?” — we quickly arrived at a simplistic and comforting answer and squandered the world’s goodwill by mounting a campaign of misguided vengeance, beginning with the carpet bombing of Afghanistan and followed by the invasion of Iraq (which was not responsible for 9/11), and continuing with our military adventures in Pakistan.

More aggression and occupation of Muslim states, more indiscriminate killing of Arab civilians, producing more hatred of the U.S. And every time one of our robotic drones bombs a wedding party in Afghanistan, more jihadists are recruited to the cause against America.

Why does all this matter? Because unless we adopt a more even-handed foreign policy in the Middle East, we are sure to be attacked again, perhaps with more devastating consequences than on 9/11. One has only to imagine the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of anti-U.S. elements in Pakistan, for instance. A change in foreign policy does not mean submitting to terrorist intimidation. It means taking a long, hard self-critical look at longstanding abuses that we have supported and working, where justified, to correct them. Hopelessness, despair, and injustice will only continue to breed more terrorists.

Moreover, the Soviet empire crumbled in part because of the enormous human and monetary costs of its Afghan war. Leading economists estimate the real cost to the U.S. of the Iraq war alone at $3 trillion, if one includes not only the up-front costs but future care for the 33,000 wounded, debt payments, replacement of worn-out equipment, etc. Bin Laden must be laughing with the fishes in his watery grave, given that the 9/11 operation cost al-Qaida only $500,000. In a time of recession and record deficits the U.S. simply cannot afford the enormous cost of endless foreign wars when people are struggling here at home. Wars which are accomplishing very little against an abstract enemy called “terrorism” which, unlike a state, can never be defeated with military power.

Three trillion is a number so large that the mind cannot comprehend it. Putting the costs of the war in perspective are some figures from an article published in 2008 in the Nation magazine on the cost of the Iraq war to the taxpayers of Cleveland, Ohio — and what that money could have been used for to improve the lives of people here at home instead. In 2008 the costs of the war were estimated to be $523 billion dollars. The Cleveland taxpayers’ share of the bill was $480 million. If you divide that $480 million up into 11 categories (I won’t list them all), it would have provided for 5,400 university scholarships, 7,000 children with Head Start, 49,000 homes with renewable electricity, 740 elementary school teachers, 900 port container inspectors, 1,045 police, etc.

Has the U.S. learned anything in the 10 years since the 9/11 attacks? Unfortunately the answer appears to be no. We continue to permit Israel to build walls and illegal settlements in the West Bank and we continue to support their atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon. We have invaded three Muslim countries since 9/11 with predictable results: producing more future terrorists rather than winning hearts and minds.

Domestically, we will see an increased militarization of our society, further curtailment of civil liberties (especially if we are attacked again — which is almost a certainty unless we alter our foreign policy in the Middle East) and even worsening deficits. You and I will foot the bill while war profiteers like Halliburton and Lockheed get richer. In 2010, for every dollar paid in federal taxes, the military received 27 cents, education 3.5 cents, environment, energy and science 3 cents, transportation 2.2 cents. Bombing civilians in Afghanistan: your tax dollars at work.

But our looming bankruptcy is a conservative’s dream: fund the masters of war while professing to cut the deficit by gutting every social program enacted since the New Deal. The “war on terror,” like the “war on drugs,” has been a costly failure, but our war machine — to justify itself — needs an enemy as much as junkies need heroin.

With cuts in domestic programs like education, health care, and infrastructure, income disparity in America (the gap between rich and poor, which is already at record levels) is likely to rise. Lincoln’s vision of a country “of the people, by the people, for the people” will likely be replaced by a nation “of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, and for the 1 percent.”

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/opinion/letters/article_8c65dbf6-d6a5-11e0-90d9-001cc4c03286.html

 

very accurate article

 

This one sentence, which forms the premise of the whole article, is simply wrong. The people behind 9/11 have before and since attacked many countries and attempted attacks in many others including Canada.

Stop blaming the victims for the crimes of Islamic extremists - they are simply mass murderers.

 

"There is a problem with this comforting theory: It is demonstrably false. If the 9/11 perpetrators truly acted out of “hatred for freedom, prosperity, tolerance, etc.,” why didn’t they attack, say, Sweden or Norway — rich, progressive, democratic nations?"

How about this? Norway and Sweden, SAY, are not superpowers or perceived as superpowers.

Oslo or NYC? which do you think will have the biggest bang for the jihadist buck-aroos?

Like it or not, NYC and America has been viewed as the biggest and best targets on the planet.

Com'on - you guys are smarter than this, aren't you?

 

I'm afraid that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. What terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal—to compel democracies to withdraw forces from the terrorists’ national homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.

R Pape, Dying to Win (New York, 2005), p. 38.

This assessment is backed by an analysis of Al Qaida from another source. The organisation is usually taken as the epitome of Islamic fundamentalism—the group most bent on declaring a religious war on the West, against modernity and secularism. But the question that Stephen Holmes rightly raises is whether religious belief causes an action (such as the bombing of the twin towers) or whether the action may be motivated by another cause but be expressed in religious form:

"Did Osama Bin Laden want to eject the United States from Saudi Arabia because its troops were desecrating sacred soil, or was he aggrieved, like any anti-colonialist or nationalist insurgent, that the United States is plundering his country’s national resources? Does Ayman al-Zawahiri, the physician who founded Egyptian Islamic Jihad and who was usually considered Bin Laden’s closest associate, want to overthrow former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak because the latter is an apostate or because he was a tyrant?"

Stephen Holmes, ‘Al-Qaeda, September 11, 2001’ in D Gambetta (ed), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford, 2005), p133.

Difficult though it may be to disentangle the religious from the non-religious, Holmes’s conclusion about the nature of Al Qaida’s ‘war’ on the US is substantially the same at Pape’s:

"The vast majority of Bin Laden’s public statements provide secular, not religious, rationales for 9/11. The principal purpose of the attack was to punish the ‘unjust and tyrannical America’. The casus belli he invokes over and over again is injustice not impiety. True, he occasionally remarks that the United States has declared war on god, but such statements would carry little conviction if not seconded by claims that the United States is tyrannising and exploiting Muslim people… Bin Laden almost never justified terrorism against the West as a means for subordinating Western unbelievers to the true faith. Instead, he almost always justifies terrorism against the West as a form of legitimate self-defence.

As above, p164, 165.

In other words, the goal of Al Qaida is no different from other national liberation movements—to achieve independence by forcing the imperialist power to retreat. It may express itself in religious terms, but in essence it pursues the same aim as previous secular-nationalist movements in the Middle East—the defeat of US imperialism and its allies in the region.

 

Because Norway and Sweden aren't a hinderance to their goals of establishing the authority and sovereignty of God over the people.
Sure they wanted us out of Saudi Arabia. But they also want to get rid of the Saudi Royals. They want to get rid of all the governments in the region because they also are a hinderance to their goals of establishing the authority and sovereignty of God over the people.
Sure, we could of avoided all of this if we had just stayed on our side of the ocean. But I dont see that as a reason to alter our foreign policy. If you start adapting your policy to appease anyone that can get in a sucker punch in on you, youll encourage anyone with a problem with our foreign policy to try and get in a sucker punch.

 

America is hated because it hurt the feelings of the Arabs? Screw Arabs.

 

Thanks for the conclusion. Walk us through the analysis necessary to reach your conclusion.

 

In 2004 radical Muslim terrorists have attacked just about every country on the Earth...Since 9/11, there have been about 17,690 deadly terror attacks.

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks

The notion that it's America's fault is just ridiculous.

From the link

"More people are killed by Islamists each year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined.

More civilians were killed by Muslim extremists in two hours on September 11th than in the 36 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland

Islamic terrorists murder more people every day than the Ku Klux Klan has in the last 50 years.

19 Muslim hijackers killed more innocents in two hours on September 11th than the number of American criminals executed in the last 65 years."

 

For you to condemn all Arabs for the crimes committed on 9-11 and then extrapolate from that that all Arabs are bad, is an absurd sweeping generalization.

 

Americans arent hated that's what the **********s want everyone to believe. Americans are viewed by the people of the western-world as being just plain dumb, arrogant, and bad mannered. I'm Canadian and I like most Americans. I understand them.

 

Most people don't have anything against Americans and I'm always shocked that people keep repeating that mantra. i've lived abroad for most of my life and I've never really experienced any anti American sentiments. If anything, they have issue with the government, but that's only because of our exposure.
It's like saying people don't like Kim Kardashian. It's simply because she's on TV all of the time.

Question to the OP. If it wasn't about freedom or our success or our lifestyle, why did the taliban and other extremists go around blowing up ancient temples and artificats that they didn't agree with?

 

This is one of the most disgusting comments I've ever read here.

 

Travel a bit.

You don't.

 

To make sweeping generalizations about any group of people or nationality whether they be Arabs, Americans or whoever, is just plain idiotic. I visited the US a couple of years back, met some wonderful people and adore US culture - music, literature and movies etc. What I abhore though, is the foreign policies of successive US governments.

 

I agree with you

 

Actually, you said my post was racist. Racist it is not. Whites and Arabs are both Caucasian groups. The same race.

 

Do you want to talk about?

 

You should feel sorry for the local Muslims. Every time I see them the question is the same: When did the circus get into town?

 

A semantic point. Your comment was directed against a certain group of people on the basis of the crimes committed on 9-11. Your comment was dumb.

 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/archaeology/2001-03-22-afghan-buddhas.htm

Third, and probably most important, the Taliban government for more than a year has been requesting international humanitarian aid for a country ravaged by drought, earthquakes, and war. No aid is forthcoming as long as the Taliban harbor international terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, an anathema to key voting members of the UN Security Council, including the United States, Russia (where the Taliban are working with the Chechnyan rebels), and China (where the Taliban are active among Muslim separatists).

As the Taliban see it, the UN and others (such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, Taiwan's National Palace Museum, and even such Taliban friends as Iran, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) will give millions of dollars to save un-Islamic stone statues but not one cent to save the lives of Afghani men, women, and children.

It doesn't help when a Japanese parliamentary delegation offers humanitarian aid in exchange for moving the statues out of the country. As journalist Hebah Abdalla wrote on March 2: "There was no 'worldwide horror' or 'international outrage' when UN officials announced Friday that more than 260 people have died in displacement camps in northern Afghanistan, where an additional 117,000 people are living in miserable conditions. … Perhaps the only consolation in all of this is that these refugees may never know how much the world cared for two statues and how little it cared for them."

 

Arabs own the circuses and employ the American high school dropouts and pregnant teenagers.

Arab Americans better educated than most in U.S.

http://www.michigandaily.com/content/arab-americans-better-educated-most-us

 

That's been my experience as well living overseas and traveling. I think that some Americans who don't travel may be under the impression there's more animosity out there than there actually is. Not to worry - Americans who do travel a lot tend to leave a good impression in host countries they visit.

 

At least you admit your error. Go forth and sin no more.

Btw, screw Arabs.

 

What's wrong with the highlighted sentence in the post appearing above?