One of the costs of failing to try to understand why we were attacked on 9/11 is that we still have no idea why we were attacked on 9/11. The right is now peddling a YouTube of Imam Rauf of the Cordoba House in which he makes the inflammatory charge that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda does the blood of innocent non-Muslims. Jim Geraghty of the National Review casts this assertion in the following light:

… to suggest that the indirect effects of a U.S. sanctions regime is remotely morally comparable to al-Qaeda’s deliberate mass murder — much less to suggest that they are morally worse — is to eviscerate one’s claim to be moderate, pro-American, or sensible. He says it is a “difficult subject to discuss with Western audiences.” Does he ever wonder why?

I listened to the clip of Imam Rauf making this statement and I did not sense that he intended to make a moral comparison or to suggest that the sanctions regime on Iraq was worse than al-Qaeda’s various bombings. He appeared to be trying to explain the motivation of al-Qaeda and the difficulty of getting Americans to understand why there is a lot of anger at America in the Islamic world. Mentioning the sanctions on Iraq was actually on point, because Usama bin-laden made the following points in his 1998 fatwa that was used to justify the African embassy bombings.

No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims.

So, basically, it was our blockade of Iraq which was the main cause, both directly and indirectly, of the al-Qaeda attacks against us. Bin-Laden pointed to Iraq in all three of his justifications for his ruling that “to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” Our forces in Saudi Arabia irritated al-Qaeda, but they were only stationed there to enforce the embargo and no-flight zone in the south of Iraq. The million dead Iraqis number that bin-Laden mentioned was an exaggerated reference to the UN report on the effect of the sanctions on the health of Iraqis. And he predicted that the United States was preparing to invade and destroy the Iraqi army. In his view, this would be done to serve Israel’s interests, but whether that is true or not, the US did invade and destroy the Iraqi army.

We can’t look back at this history in a vacuum. It’s highly doubtful that bin-Laden was correct when he asserted that the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq in 1998. However, Congress did pass the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 making it the official policy of our government to work towards regime change in Iraq. Also, in December of 1998, the U.S. bombed Iraq for four continuous days during Operation Desert Fox. We know now that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in 1998, but the Clinton administration justified the bombing as an effort to degrade Hussein’s WMD capability. Here’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright:

“I don’t think we’re pretending that we can get everything, so this is – I think – we are being very honest about what our ability is. We are lessening, degrading his ability to use this. The weapons of mass destruction are the threat of the future. I think the president explained very clearly to the American people that this is the threat of the 21st century. [. . .] [W]hat it means is that we know we can’t get everything, but degrading is the right word.”

Now, one can justify these acts taken by the U.S. government. But it should be understood that, collectively, they gave rise to a lot of resentment which fueled al-Qaeda’s rhetoric and appeal. Even moderate Muslims who do not support killing innocent civilians are aware of the tremendous human cost inflicted on Iraq both prior to and during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And this presents a problem for a person like Imam Rauf who seeks to foster dialogue between the Islamic world and the West. It’s not a one-way conversation where Muslims are made to understand the West’s good intentions. It’s also a conversation where the West is made to understand what actions on their part have led to resentment and backlash. Imam Rauf prefaced his statement by saying that it is a very difficult conversation to have with the West because we don’t acknowledge any of the facts that serve as the starting point from a Muslim perspective.

It’s objectively true that, at least indirectly, the UN sanctions on Iraq led to more death than all of al-Qaeda’s attacks combined. The primary fault for that lays with Saddam Hussein’s epic misuse of Iraq’s resources, but denying medicines, and medical and sanitation equipment to Iraq was also a major contributing factor. And even if we place the majority of blame on Hussein for the loss of life under the sanctions, we have to deal with the actual invasion and occupation of Iraq which resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis. A lot of innocent Muslims have been killed in Afghanistan, too.

It shouldn’t be considered un-American to point out these facts. We must face these facts if we want to have a dialogue with the Islamic world. And we need to have a better explanation for our actions than Madeline Albright’s insistence that “it was worth it.”

Yet, as the right’s reaction makes clear, Imam Rauf was correct to point out that it is difficult to have this conversation because a lot of Americans don’t want to listen. President Bush deflected all introspection after 9/11. The official position of the U.S. government and its lapdog press was that there was no possible justification for the attacks and, therefore, any discussion of motivation was somehow a rationalization. They told us that we were hated for our freedoms, and that was supposed to suffice for our understanding of public opinion in the Islamic world. In truth, our freedoms were the main thing that most Muslims respected and admired about our country. What they disliked was our foreign policy. And some of them, a small minority, were sufficiently angered by our foreign policy that they chose to take matters into their own hands and fight back. Failing to understand their motivations doesn’t make it less likely that we’ll face terrorist acts in the future. Understanding their anger doesn’t mean that we have to appease them or change all our policies, but it allows us to make a rational cost-benefit analysis going forward.