You want to protect us? Stop starting wars, stop bombing people in other countries

[markpkessinger]

12. Are you really so unaware . . .

. . . of the U.S.'s long and troubled history of supporting brutally repressive regimes so long as those regimes catered to the exploitation of those countries' natural resources by U.S. and British-based oil companies? You really think it was an accident that 19 of the 21 hijackers were Saudis, given that the Saudi government is one of the most egregious violators of human rights of its own citizens (those, that is, who weren't lucky enough to be born into the extended royal family)? Whatever the motives of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Yousef, and Osama bin Laden, there was a fertile field of discontent from which to draw (or exploit) followers, and the fertilizer of that field was decades of U.S.'s own exploitative and hypocritical policies with regard to oil-rich countries in the Middle East.