There is arising in many media a noxious form of terrorist-apologist. The say: "The acts of September 11 were evil and the perpetrators are evil but really the Americans brought this upon ourselves." Sometimes "the Americans" is replaced with "we Americans".
In particular, radical leftists with an axe to grind put the blame on "globalization". Despite an attractive surface logic, this assertion is fundamentally ludicrous and wrong. I find it offensive that they would use this crisis as an excuse to advance their agenda.
I am a Canadian and I want to say to Americans: it was not your fault! Nothing in the world is completely isolated from everything else so of course in some sense the West has done things which contributed to this act. But I claim that the terrorists are much more angry about the US doing the right things than doing evil ones.
The US is a flawed country that has (more than most countries) been involved in criminal activities around the world. But it mostly tries to do the right things in foreign affairs. Most of its most horrible acts were part of the cold war. Now we all benefit from the lifting of the nuclear shadow. Since then, the US has retracted support for dicators around the world and they have fallen like bowling pins: Suharto, Pinochet, Marcos, Abacha, etc. etc.
Note that just as the US shifts from being a backer of dicatators to a promoter of democracy (if only an inconsistent one), Bin Laden shifts from hating the Soviet Union to hating the US. In fact, the US has attracted the wrath of Bin Laden precisely because it has been doing the right things.
Most American actions in the Middle East have been fundamentally right and necessary. The American government should be most ashamed of its inactions. It doesn't press its Middle Eastern allies to move to democracy.
If you want to know why some Arabs hate Americans, you merely need to listen to them. Bin Laden has been quite clear about his list of grievances.
The most contentious issue in the Middle East is whether the nation of Israel has a right to exist, and if so, what its borders should be and what its relationships should be with its Palestinian residents and Arab neighbours. This question defies easy answers. The Israeli state is fundamentally racist and discriminates on the basis of relgion. Its neighbours are the same. Both groups claim Jerusalem as a holy city.
This does not allow Western countries much room to manouver. We do not have the option of merely withdrawing from the region. The Arabic countries have repeatedly stated that they deny Israel its right to exist and would destroy it if they could. Many speak of "finishing the job" that Hitler started. If America did not guarantee Israel's defense, the entire region could erupt into a war which could easily escalate from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons.
It is unbelievably unfair to pretend that the American government has ignored the Palestinian point of view. Bill Clinton spent invaluable months of his time in office trying to broker a deal that would allow both Israelis and Palestinians their respective homelands. America has been clear and unambiguous in its condemnation of Israeli violent excesses and geographic expansion. Israel's constant expansion and progressive occupation is both cynical and harmful. The US has told Israel that.
There is only one solution to the Israeli question. One side must choose to take the high ground and hope that the other follows. For example, Israel's neighbours (including the Palestinians) could cease their language of destruction and racism. They could shelve their ideologies of state religion and totalitarianism. When they are unambiguously the "good guys", the West would be able to apply moral susasion to Israel. As it is, Israel claims with much justification that it manhandles its Arab citizens and neighbours because that is the only way to survive in a rough part of the world. Or vice versa, Israel could withdraw to more reasonable boundaries and ask for US backup if their enemies take advantage of their "weakness".
Nevertheless, America need not be ashamed of its role in Israel. There is no clear right side or wrong side in the dispute. It would be clearly wrong to withdraw and allow the region to slide into a mult-national war or worse.
The US has been involved in a morally ambiguous ongoing assault on the Iraqi people. There is no doubt that the sanctions hurt more civilians than followers of Saddam Hussein. The bombing that preceded them was similarly catastrophic.
Nevertheless, recall that the sanctions are entirely conditional. If and when Saddam Hussein chooses to allow inspectors to verify that he is not developing chemical or nuclear weapons, the sanctions can be lifted. In the long term it would be an extremely bad idea to let Hussein aggragate weapons of mass destruction. This is especially true given what we know about his ability to send missiles into Israeli cities. Let's put blame where blame belongs: Saddam Hussein has dragged his people back into the stone ages. He is a megalomaniac with no concern for their lives. American should not give in to his blackmail.
Osama Bin Laden considers the American military presence in Saudia Arabia to be an descration of Muslim holy lands. America's presence there has both an offensive and defensive role. The offensive role is to attack Iraq. This has already been discussed. The defensive role is the protection of Saudia Arabia from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. America's role there is a stabilizing force. Had America been there (or even better, in Kuwait) before the Gulf War, there would have been no Gulf War.
It is vital to understand that America is there at the behest of the Saudi government which is likely representative (in this issue) of the Saudi people. Therefore America has every right to be there. It is a singular demonstration of Bin Laden's dementia that he would open up his homeland to Iraqi attack rather than allow America to defend it.
The United States exemplifies a government that is not ruled according to any holy book.
Radical religious fundamentalists are a different group altogether. Consider this quote from Bin Laden: "We pray to God, Praise and Glory be to him, to help Muslims expel the Americans and Jews from Islamic countries." He is a self-described ethnic cleanser just like Slobodan Milosovec. Americans should take his hatred as a badge of honour.
There has arisen within the Left (of which I consider myself a part) a certain fuzzy-headedness. Where the the Left historically stood FOR something (racial and gender equality), now radicals within the movement have decided to just be AGAINST things, in paticular capitalism and to be particularly particular, the "global" kind of capitalism. They act as if this global capitalism were new and as if it were a serious threat in the same ballpark as facism and communism.
Fine. They are welcome to their opinions. But now they have latched onto this event and decided to claim that this event was "caused by" globalization.
The term "globalization" is very poorly defined. When you press people on it they claim that they are against "corporate rule". I know, I used to be involved with "the movement." Those against globalization can't agree on whether they are against free trade, cross-border capital movement, foreign ownership or what?
Anti-globalizers are against sweatshops. So are we all. But are there sweatshops in Saudia Arabia or Palestine? What do sweatshops have to do with the Middle East? The Middle East is one of the least "globalized" parts of the world (outside of Africa) and yet it has the highest levels of conflict. If globalization were the cause of conflict then highly globalized places like Taiwan, South Korean and Mexico should be bombing us, not Middle Easterners.
There is an implication that the United States is involved in the Middle East at the behest of the "global" corporations. If this is "globalization" then it is a very old phenomenon and not something new at all. The United States would defend its allies in an oil-rich part of the world no matter what the corporations say. Oil is power. The US dominates that power to prevent the region's tin-pot dictators from doing so. (another theory is that the US likes the fact that Saudi Arabia pays so much for weapons) Imagine the weapons Saddam Hussein could amass if he had the combined riches of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait at his disposal.
Leftist apologists love to point out that Osama Bin Laden was trained and partially sponsored by the US government in the war against the Soviets. The US did many things in that war that were ignoble and sometimes counter-productive. Nevertheless, we live in a world where communism, fascism and every other form of totalatarianism is in retreat (save perhaps Islamism). I find it hard, now, to second guess the tactics of those won us this war. We know for sure that the Soviets had no qualms about supporting dicators like Fidel Castro and Tito.
US foreign policy has shifted dramatically since the end of the Cold War. We've seen US-backed dicatorships crumble in the Philippines, Indonesia and Chile. In some cases the US helped these dicatorships to crumble directly and we can only presume that in the others they must have withdrawn their cold-war era support at the end of the Cold War.
It is precisely when US foreign policy shifted from supporting totalitarianism to living up to democractic ideology that Osama Bin Laden turned his hatred towards the West. When communism was the major threat to Islamic fundamentalist government, Bin Laden fought it. Now secular democractic capitalism is the leading threat.
The US faces the Bin Laden threat not because it trained him, but because it won the war that it trained him to fight. Now Western democracy (symbolized by the US) is the largest obsticle between Bin Laden and a unified pan-Islamic, pan-Arabic theocracy.
Western intellectuals would like this to be a very complicated situation. The US corporations set up sweatshops which humiliate the sweatshop employees who turn homicidal and attack the World Trade Center. It is nice when you know the bad guys (evil corporations) before the crime has even been committed.
Unfortunately it is not true. It is no more true that corporations are to blame now, then the last time a psyhopathic egomaniac brain-washed impoverished young men into believing that democracy is weak and that Jews are behind all of the world's problems. Sometimes people hate you and it isn't your fault.
Osama Bin Laden is an evil man. He is the kind of enemy that you make when you do the right things. America could not both live up to its ideals and avoid offending Bin Laden and his comrades. If America withdraws from the Middle East because of this attack then Bin Laden has achieved his goal and will have opportunity to expand his scope of influence.