Victor Davis Hanson has a good piece in the National Review about the struggles between right and left in a post 9/11 world. He discusses the "alternative narrative" that has been used by the left to undermine the war; that America is at fault, that we unfairly favor Israel, or that we have mistreated muslims in the larger scope of things.
Hanson explores those charges and others, and dispels them, by simply being cognizant of history.
Prior to 9/11, the United States had given an aggregate of over $50 billion to Egypt, and had allotted about the same amount of aid to Israel as to its frontline enemies. We had helped to save Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, and received little if any thanks for bombing Christian Europeans to finish in a matter of weeks what all the crack-pot jihadists had not done by flocking to the Balkans in a decade. (Ed: reverse emphasis is Hanson's)
Long before Afghanistan and Iraq, bin Laden declared war on America in 1998, citing the U.N. embargo of Iraq and troops in Saudi Arabia; when those were no longer issues, he did not cease, but continued his murdering. He harbored a deep-seated contempt for Western values, even though he was eaten within by uncontrolled envy and felt empowered by years of appeasement after a series of attacks on our embassies, bases, ships, and buildings, both here and abroad.
If the larger picture is absorbed, bin Laden's creed may be accurately described as, "the enemy of my enemy...is my enemy."
Indeed, bin Laden harbored more hatred for an America that stopped the Balkan holocaust of Muslims than for Slobodan Milosevic who started it.
He goes on. Be sure to read the whole thing.
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