Let’s consider two examples – Iran and Iraq.
When Iranians took U.S. embassy officials hostage during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, I think that it would be safe to say that most Americans had no idea why the Iranian revolutionaries were so angry at the United States. No doubt Americans assumed that the revolutionaries simply hated America for its freedom and values.
But Iranians knew that in 1953 the CIA had surreptitiously entered Iran and fomented a coup that resulted in the ouster of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, a man named Mohammed Mossadegh. Not surprisingly, Mossadegh was highly respected by the Iranian people, and he also was selected as Time magazine’s Man of the Year.
Ousting Mossadegh from power, the CIA replaced him with the shah of Iran, who, with his savage secret police force, proceeded to oppress, brutalize, and torture the Iranian populace for the next 25 years.
It was no different with respect to the Iraqi people. While President Bush today bases his invasion of Iraq on the notion that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous dictator who was trying to secure weapons of mass destruction, he fails to mention that U.S. officials, including President George H.W. Bush, had been strong supporters of this dictator throughout the 1980s. In fact, the current President Bush also fails to mention that it was the United States and other Western countries that furnished Saddam with biological and chemical weapons along with nuclear technology.
Then, when Saddam became the new official enemy of the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. government, in combination with the UN, proceeded to implement what is arguably the most brutal set of sanctions in world history. Over the course of more than a decade, the sanctions contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Ramzi Yousef, one of the 1993 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center, angrily cited the sanctions as one of the reasons for that attack. Later, two high UN officials resigned in protest against what they termed U.S.-government–caused genocide. The most authoritative studies have concluded that approximately 300,000 children lost their lives from infection and illness attributed to the sanctions. But when U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright was asked by 60 Minutes whether the deaths of the Iraqi children had been “worth it,” she answered that, yes, the deaths had been “worth it.”
Then there were the illegal “no-fly zones” over Iraq, which had been authorized by neither the U.S. Congress nor the UN. The missiles fired by U.S. warplanes in the enforcement of the “no-fly” policy killed an untold number of additional Iraqis.
Finally, there has been the brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq, a country that never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so, which has resulted in the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of more Iraqis (a recent study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University put the number at more than 650,000), not to mention the conversion of Iraq into a hellhole and wasteland of violence and destruction.
It is almost incredible that, although U.S. intelligence agencies have recently concluded that the invasion of Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism against the United States, there are still U.S. officials who maintain that all the bad things that the U.S. government did in the Middle East had nothing to do with the anger and hatred that led to the 9/11 attacks. It’s all because they hate America’s “freedom and values,” not because the U.S. government has killed, tortured, abused, and humiliated people in the Middle East for years.