The difficulty is that your notion of seeing things from "all sides" presumes a rationality not possessed by the terrorists responsible. Throughout your argument you presume a cause and effect relationship.
"It can't be denied that the US attitude towards the Middle East, and their handling of issues there, has earned them enemies," you say. The realities of my nation's involvement in the Middle East are open for debate, but I must advance the notion that whoever the greatest symbol of Western ideology was at the time would have been the object of fundamentalist fury. Remember that Osama bin Laden supported attacks upon the Soviet Union until the Gulf War - he shifted as the world shifted.
He, Hezbola, Islamic Jihad and all of their ilk have set their sights not only on the United States, but on the entire notion of secular, civil society. The "other side" you see is not interested in cause and effect relationships - this attack is not "revenge" for our previous strike. It is a successful continuation of the attack of 1993, and it is a successful attempt to murder as many people as possible.
The other side is a group of extremists pathologically hellbent on creating a world that looks like the golden age of imperial islam in the seventh century. In that world, we do not exist. If we, as a society, made no response whatsoever to the attack on our citizens, if we pulled all of our support for Israel and told the terrorists that the Middle East was theirs, the attacks on Western nations would continue.
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"All sides?"
Date: 2001-09-13 09:45 am (UTC)"It can't be denied that the US attitude towards the Middle East, and their handling of issues there, has earned them enemies," you say. The realities of my nation's involvement in the Middle East are open for debate, but I must advance the notion that whoever the greatest symbol of Western ideology was at the time would have been the object of fundamentalist fury. Remember that Osama bin Laden supported attacks upon the Soviet Union until the Gulf War - he shifted as the world shifted.
He, Hezbola, Islamic Jihad and all of their ilk have set their sights not only on the United States, but on the entire notion of secular, civil society. The "other side" you see is not interested in cause and effect relationships - this attack is not "revenge" for our previous strike. It is a successful continuation of the attack of 1993, and it is a successful attempt to murder as many people as possible.
The other side is a group of extremists pathologically hellbent on creating a world that looks like the golden age of imperial islam in the seventh century. In that world, we do not exist. If we, as a society, made no response whatsoever to the attack on our citizens, if we pulled all of our support for Israel and told the terrorists that the Middle East was theirs, the attacks on Western nations would continue.
That is what I see when I look at all sides.