My first attempt at a diary on this subject was lively and contested, but it didn't reach a recommended status because it was perceived as a cheap shot, or misframing of the argument.
That was intentional. But I will try again, and try to be more clear.
Do Kossites agree with Usama's DESCRIPTION of American foreign policy?
Do they see our policies as rapacious, anti-Muslim, and designed to benefit Israel by keeping Arabs splintered and weak?
From the anecdotal evidence, on balance, it appears they do.
Yet, they fiercely reject any conflation with agreeing on this main point and agreeing with UBL on anything else.
That should be obvious. Who is crazy enough to approve of one's would-be murderer?
I got nearly 100 responses to my diary. Many of them objected to the framing of the question. But the ones that attempted to address the substance of the question had a certain tenor. A sampling below. [note: since I excerpted, I haven't included identities because it some cases it slightly alters the intended meaning]
If we. . . were a frustrated intellectual in an impoverished land in a world dominated by the gluttonous west, we are almost certain we'd resort to terrorism... What would you do if your heart was consumed by justifiable rage?
The truth is out there. Open your eyes, smell the coffee - we are no better than we were when we invaded Honduras for the benefit of United Fruit.
It's always been about grabbing other people's stuff so that we can continue to maintain our highest standard of living, no matter what the cost is to others. We make wars, displace people, and then pat ourselves on the back for giving some of them refugee status here.
In response to the question: Are we so bad?
YES! Yes, we are! We ARE so bad. We've been bad for decades. I have three letters for you:
C. I. A.
we kossicans agree with UBL that iraq is a racist, imperialist war of choice. we recognize that our government is making serious transgressions on most fronts.
I'd say his analysis from 1998 is pretty accurate in terms of the goals and methods of the American power structure today. Bushco and his minions are definitely engaged in a neo-colonial oil grab in the middle east---in essence, Bushco has expanded the doctrine of Manifest Destiny to include the entire world.
But in 1998, there was a whole different dynamic. Clinton saw resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict as the key to overall progress in the Middle East. Maintaining an agressive containment policy against Iraq was important to Israel, and thus the policy was maintained. and the rest of US policy in the mideast was held in a status quo--hostage to the "peace process."
As far as I can tell only one poster decided to make any effort to defend America's foreign policy.
While I did disagree with Iraq, I had no problem with the invasion of Afghanistan, and I normally feel that the US is, on balance, a force for good in the world. Just ask the Poles or the East Germans or the Central Asians how much happier they are to be freed from under the paw of the Red Bear, or the Taiwanese and South Koreans for the protection from the Chinese/North Korean menace. I abhor communism and I am pleased we did anything we could to stamp it out worldwide, even if our tactics were skating on the thin edge of ethics. I also find the oppression of women, gays, and non-Muslims, as well as the theocratic tyranny advocated by bin Laden to be horrific and inexcusable. And the strike at Afghanistan was totally justified, as the Taliban was defending the man who attacked us. We were well within our rights to invade Afghanistan, and the only problem Bush had was doing a poor job of it.
How many of you agree with the following statements:
for over 13 years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula.
Plundering its riches.
Dictating to its rulers.
Humiliating its people.
Terrorizing its neighbors.
Turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
Using the Peninsula as a staging post to attack the Iraqi people.
The aim is (at least partially) to serve the the interests of Israel and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem.
The aim is (at least partially) 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 occupation of the Peninsula.
Now I have to say that I personally find a lot of things in this bill of indictment to agree with. I think it is a harsh and one-sided point of view. And I have no sympathy for Usama Bin-Laden or his crazed followers.
But it is hard to argue that we have not, at least, created this perception about our motives, and that it has gotten a lot worse under Bush.
In fact, much of what seemed unfair when directed against the Clinton administration seems a lot more valid now that we have marched preemptively into Baghdad, using our bases on the Peninsula AND have abandoned the peace process in Israel.
Having said all that, I don't think that the Iraq war was ONLY about oil, and Israel. A lot of it was about the crumbling of the containment policy in the United Nations, and a lot of it was a bipartisan recognition that the status quo in Iraq was not working, not progressing, not keeping us safe, and not going to endure in its present form for much longer.
I also don't think American foreign policy has been a net negative. I believe that it has been a net positive. The Cold War was worth fighting, even if not every battle in it was wise or effective. The Marshall Plan, the United Nations, promoting human rights and self-determination...all of these have been imperfect benefits to mankind that would not have occurred without American leadership.
But our policies in the Muslim world have been almost uniformly bad. Our relationships to the Shah and the Sauds, our Indonesia policy, our failure of leadership in Israel, our petro client states through the Gulf and Africa...
Other than keeping these oil fields out of the hands of the Soviets we have been a failure in every other regard.
I think the biggest block of the left saw 9/11 as a punishment for our support of the Sauds, Mubarak, and the settlers.
Since the left generally disagrees with these policies it could at least understand the grievance if not the method of retaliation.
And as Bush has pursued even more unpopular policies in the Middle East, this unease with the basic bipartisan American policy has grown exponentially.
I believe a gulf has opened up, a wide chasm, between how the left sees America, and American foreign policy and how the majority of Americans see us.
We keep warning that these policies make us MORE vulnerable to attack because we see the attacks as a response to our policies.
But most Americans have no problem with our policies in the Middle East. They have no opinion on Mubarak at all, so they have no idea why Zawahiri wants to kill them. It must be because they hate our lifestyle, or freedom, or something.
And I think that the reason the left cannot convince the majority to trust us to lead the country is that we have not convinced the country that our Middle Eastern policies (not just Iraq) are not only wrong, but the very source of our security problems.
And perhaps the biggest difficulty of convincing Americans of this is the fact that our interpretation of the facts is so close to Usama's interpretation of the facts.
It becomes easy to marginalize our position as either siding with the terrorists or appeasing them.