Doug Bandow

The Answer to Why They Hate Us

The five Americans arrested in Pakistan for apparently planning on joining al-Qaeda didn’t turn against their country because it was so free.  They were angry because they perceived it to be attacking Muslims.

Writes Chuck Pena:

 The answer – which is a microcosm for larger U.S. foreign policy – is staring us straight in the face.  And, like we do with foreign policy, we want to ignore it.

Reportedly, the group made what is described as a farewell video (but not necessarily a martyrdom suicide terrorism video) with reference the ongoing conflicts in the world (presumably Iraq and Afghanistan) and that young Muslims had to do something to defend Muslims.  According to Pakistani authorities, the young men men “were of the opinion that a jihad must be waged against the infidels for the atrocities committed by them against Muslims around the world.”

In other words, Minni, Farooq, Yemer, Khan, and Zamzam appear to have been motivated by what we do.  In simple terms, because our policies result in actions that kill Muslims.  Harvard professor Steven Walt did a back-of-the-envelope (and conservative, i.e., low end) calculation and came up with the number 288,000 for how many Muslims the United States has killed in the last 30 years (in contrast, Walt calculates that Muslims have killed about 10,000 Americans over the same time period – 2,800 of which were the result of the 9/11 attacks). He provides plenty of caveats:

• The United States is not solely responsible for some of those fatalities, most notably in the case of “excess deaths” attributable to the U.N. sanctions against Iraq.
• The United States is not solely to blame for the sectarian violence that engulfed Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
• The fact that people died as a result of certain U.S. actions does not by itself mean that those policy decisions were wrong.

Even with the caveats, the numbers can’t be ignored.  So why is it so hard for us to understand that Muslims – perhaps including the five young men from Northern Virginia – would be motivated to become terrorists?

U.S. government misbehavior does not justify terrorism against civilians.  But intervention carries the price of terrorism.  It is time policymakers considered that cost before unnecessarily meddling in events around the world.