US actions helped spawn tragedy of 9/11

Monday, our thoughts turned to the 9/11 tragedy. We pondered this deliberate and desperately hateful act and measured its impact on human lives and how it changed our world forever. What I seek to bring into focus is the realization that this barbaric act did not arise in a vacuum. People hate the U.S., and for good reasons -- reasons that if the shoe were on the other foot, you would fight for too. Much of the world sees the United States not as the righteous knight on a white charger, but as an arrogant, meddling foreigner and crusading infidel who has finally gotten a just measure of comeuppance. We have been busily meddling and manipulating for five decades. Historically, our self-serving efforts to influence or control the flow of Middle Eastern politics has grown a great and terrible resentment and resolve in these people, which worsens every day. I want to remind people that our government supported the Shah of Iran to contain the Soviets. Those policies failed and the reaction to his tyranny cast us out. We supported Saddam Hussein to contain the subsequent radical Islamic Iranian reaction. In the course of so doing, the U.S. supplied Saddam with the nerve gas, which he used on them and the Kurds. Saddam was led to believe by our previous favors we would look the other way at his conquest attempts; it was the U.S. that helped create this Saddam/Frankenstein that invaded Kuwait. Today we support a tiny country of six million Jews amid a billion irate and nationalistic Muslims. Our hands are not clean. In my view, our bullish and ham-handed foreign policies inflame the great cultural canyons between us and the Middle Eastern countries and is further aggravated by a U.S. administration that is intent on trying to grow democracies in soil unfit for them. What more proof do we need that our path is wrong? We have a tiger by the tail, our situation is untenable and we reap the whirlwind. We need to get out of the Middle East. We do not have the moral high ground. It is sapping our wealth and strength as a nation. So wave the flags and feel patriotic, if you must. But while you are at it have some sense of understanding that this situation is largely self-inflicted. Reduce your oil usage and sell that big truck. And when it's time, vote. Vote with your head and not with your heart. Mike Modelle, Vineland - Published in the Daily Journal, September 15, 2006