Steve Benen wonders why conservatives hate America. Actually, he wonders why Peggy Noonan, Dinesh D’Souza, and Glenn Beck think our own moral failings are responsible for and, to some degree justify, terrorist attacks against our homeland.
It’s actually quite simple. Do you want to know why 9/11 happened? It came out of two major American policies. The first was the decision to pry Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, train their internal security forces, and build them a modern American-made military. We did that for two main reasons. First, it was part of a deal to get Anwar Sadat to recognize Israel. Second, it was a better deal for us to arm Egypt than to let the Soviets do it. We can argue all day about the overall wisdom of this policy, but I tend to agree with it. Sadat paid for his courage with his life. And Mubarak hasn’t been eager to suffer the same fate. Therefore, for the last quarter century, we have been complicit in Egypt’s extremely harsh treatment of internal dissidents. All that time, Ayman al-Zawahiri and his organization, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, have been working to topple the Mubarak regime. Zawahiri eventually decided that they would never succeed so long as the United States was propping Mubarak up. So, he joined with another faction that had a different beef.
That second organization arose in response to a second American foreign policy decision. That decision was to give Saddam Hussein a green-light to invade Kuwait. We probably did not anticipate that Saddam would annex all of Kuwait, but we did tell him:
“We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”
And, Boy Howdy, are we still paying for that mistake. Once a decision was made to liberate Kuwait from the grip of Hussein, we needed Saudi cooperation. Usama bin-Laden offered to build fortifications and provide other defenses for Saudi Arabia’s security. The Saudi regime rejected that offer and allowed U.S. military forces to build bases within the kingdom. And, when the war was over, we stayed. Bin-Laden then began a campaign of terror aimed at driving American out of Saudi Arabia. After 9/11, we moved our main air base to Qatar.
These two policies: propping up the Mubarak regime and basing troops in Saudi Arabia are the main two reasons we were attacked on 9/11. It’s no accident that most of the hijackers were Saudis and the team leader was an Egyptian.
Is it at all possible that these terrorists were motivated by our promiscuity, tolerance for homosexuality, and secularism? No. Those features of our society might have made it easier to justify attacking innocent civilians, but the motivation was political and internal to Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
If you want to know how al-Qaeda justified the attacks to themselves, why not take them at their word? Here is what bin-Laden said in his 1998 fatwa:
First, for over seven years [ed note: 1991-1998] 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 [ed note: we bombed Iraq in 1998] 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… [ed note: reference to the embargo, sanctions, no-fly zones] 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.
When bin-Laden said, in 1998, that we were eager to destroy Iraq, I thought he was nuts. But that was because Bill Clinton clearly had no desire to destroy Iraq. Other people…people waiting in the wings…neo-conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute…were busy creating the Project for a New American Century. They did want to destroy Iraq. They stole an election and then they promptly destroyed Iraq. The only real question is whether they would have done it even without bin-Laden’s preemptive counterattack.
