More Terrorist Blowback from U.S. Foreign Policy

Campaign for Liberty | March 4, 2010
By Jacob Hornberger

Immediately after 9/11, Bush administration officials declared the motivation of the terrorists: that the terrorists hated America for its "freedom and values."

In other words, the 9/11 attacks, according to President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and other U.S. officials, had absolutely nothing to do with the boiling rage in the Middle East over U.S. foreign policy.

Sure, the U.S. government had supported Saddam Hussein, even delivering to him those infamous WMDS (see: http://www.fff.org/comment/com0304p.asp), and had supported other corrupt, authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, such as Iran, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

Sure, the U.S. government had killed countless Iraqis during the Persian Gulf War and intentionally destroyed Iraq's water-and-sewage treatment plants during the war after a Pentagon study determined that such action would help to spread infectious illnesses among the Iraqi people. (See: http://www.progressive.org/mag/nagy0901.html.)

Sure, the U.S. government enforced one of the most brutal and deadly systems of sanctions in history against Iraq for more than ten years, which succeeded in contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. (See: http://www.fff.org/whatsNew/2004-02-09a.htm.)

Sure, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright had declared to the world on "Sixty Minutes" that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children had been "worth it." (See: http://www.fff.org/comment/com0311c.asp.)

Sure, the U.S. government had stationed troops near Islamic holy lands knowing that such would antagonize people of Muslim faith in the Middle East.

Sure, the U.S. government continually provided unconditional financial and military aid to the Israeli government.

But no, according to Bush, Cheney, and their cohorts, none of this had anything to do with why people in the Middle East were boiling over with rage prior to 9/11. According to them, people in the Middle East were apparently either indifferent to all this death, destruction, and humiliation at the hands of the U.S. Empire or maybe even favored it.

You see, the mindset among the neocon community has always been: The U.S. Empire is incapable of doing anything morally or legally wrong to foreigners, especially to those living in the Middle East. The Empire is good per se. And anyone who suggests that the Empire's actions motivated the terrorists is crazy, irrational, or just plain unpatriotic. Every normal-thinking American is expected to know that the Empire is all-good, all-caring, all-compassionate, all saintly, and all-godly.

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