If I am to distrust the leaders of only one side, which side should I choose?

Ave Caesar imperator, morituri te salutant

This was certainly brave of you to post . . . as a person from a place who's ruling country has changed, I once innocently posted the questions of why settlers, who said that they were quite attached to their homes and farms but who now found themselves on the other side of an international boarder, did not simply stay on and become "Jewish Palestinians" in the way there are many "Israeli Arabs".

I did not get a much of a thoughtful and measured reaction.

*cough* Ahem. Let's get right down to it.

- They do hate our freedom, but not for why Bush wants us to think. They hate all freedom and democracy because they support Islamic states.

- Iran is a very hostile government who supports the destruction of Israel. America (and the British) have fucked that country royally, so we're not blameless in the result, but it's still not a pleasant place to be. From what I've read, it'll take Iran about a decade to develop homemade nukes. They seem to have no real desire for peace talks, and might boy down to economic concessions. Iranian people are all right. Pretty sexist, but good proud people. Their government is abhorrent.

- Israel has no intention of using nuclear weapons. I can't stand it when people blindly call Israel an aggressor in the Middle East, when it's THE most-attacked region on the sub-continent. Israel is not a rogue power. Israel is a western democracy fighting terrorism. We don't inspect them, nor do we inspect the French, who unlike Israel HAVE stated they're willing to use nuclear weapons if the opportunity presented itself. That you would use Israel points out your own double standard, not one between Israel and Iran.

- We did not provoke the Iran/Iraq war. The rivalry between Persia and Mesopotamia is as old as time. It is the height of arrogance to claim we're anything but side players in that hatred. We backed Iraq because we didn't like Iran thanks to our friend the Shah's removal. The revolution was a central part of the war, but in Iran's motivations (they hated Iraq's supposed oppression of Shiites and loose Islamic law) and in our involvement. If we were Iran's buddies at the time, we would have given them the weapons.

- There will never be peace with terrorists. Ever. Terrorists will see weakness as the fact that they are winning (and they will be right). No amount of wishful thinking will ever change this, because this is the nature of the terrorist game and the card they play. Bin Laden's actions made him a hero. Were the people cheering in the streets on 9/11 "showing us what they really are"?

- Once again, I can't stand it when people paint Israel as this great oppressor. Israel does two horrible things: kills Palestinian civilians when it goes after terrorists in retaliation for Palestinian attacks, and shuts down its borders when the Palestinians start up the Intifada. I seriously do not get how most liberals do not understand that these actions are poked by Palestinians, not the Israelis. When the militants are quiet, life is better for all. The borders are open, trade resumes, and people's lives improve. I am not saying everything Israel has done is right. I am saying that your statements are loaded with inaccurate rhetoric as to the actual situations on the ground.

- Look, I'll be blunt. Quit fucking stereotyping. An Iraqi is not an Iranian nor is an Iranian a Palestinian. You just can't lump them all together into one big "middle east" like you do. Just because most of them have the same skin tone and religion doesn't mean you can compare. It's like talking Western Europe like it's one nation because they're all catholic! No. They've got individual cultures, different languages and stances on issues. Relations with the west go by a country-to-country basis. The Saudis, for example, like us because we protect their oil and are good commercial partners. The Saudis in turn (like most of the Arab world) hate the Palestinians, and have been using them as pawns to advance their agenda about Israel for the past fifty years. The Palestinians in turn hate the Jordanians, who hate the Palestinians because they tried to take over the country. This is something most Western people just don't get. This is a region RIFE with deep ethnic sentimentalities and hatreds, as well as deep prides.

- Why do they hate us? There are two "theys", those who attack and those who don't. Those who don't attack us but hate us hate us because we've always fucked with their region and they don't like it, but more importantly because we're sitting in Afghanistan and Iraq and life hasn't become much orderly yet. They hate us because they thought we were going to bring them American efficiency and dollars, and instead we made their lives freer, but worse overall. When you give somebody a harder time than when you did before, they're going to hate you. They don't hate us because they drop bombs on civilians. Liberals hate people because they drop bombs on civilians. For most people, you drop a bomb on a family two towns over and they might be upset, but they won't care. It's wartime, what else do you expect? You take away their electricity, they'll be pissed. You occupy their land and sit in the palace of the person they hated and make safety only for yourself, or desecrate their religion, then you've got the average person's hatred.

In Iraq, the insurgency is made up largely of Sunnis who aren't happy they lost their minority rule. Their goal is not so much to destroy America as to make sure the reconstruction fails. That way, they can move back into power. Saddam seemed to have planned this for a while, although his insurgency was poorly organized. When foreign fighters poured in (from Syria and especially Iran) the insurgency became more modern and systematic. In general, it's a cheap thrill for people to fire a rocket at a convoy then leave. You get paid better in the insurgency than you do in the army, and it taps into a vein of people unhappy with the occupation or invasion.

Those who run the insurgency are just using them for a larger international role. They kidnap and behead people in order to raise ransom money to continue their operations. If they don't get the money, they behead the person and send a political message instead. Either way, they win.

But these are meat and potatoes. I think you're talkin about the big fish, the Al Quedas, the people who fly planes into buildings or blow themselves up in London subways. Why do they hate us? Here's why:

1. We represent a freedom they cannot cede to and still survive. Terrorists feed of people's angers against repressive governments. Terrorists don't believe this, of course, but there's no reason why they should.
2. They're fanatics. Obvious.
3. They're brainwashed. Again, obvious.
4. Martyrdom is an exotic death. If you kill a few people in Israel, you're showered as hero in the Palestinian cities.
5. There's good money in it.
6. People are assholes.
7. They feel a sense of duty to get revenge.

That's a very simplistic way of looking at it, though. There is no way to psychologically profile a suicide bomber. They come from all walks of life: rich and poor. The only thing they have in common is that they're willing to die for something to believe they to be right, which brings me to the last one:

8. They believe what they're doing is just. If you can convince them that fighting America is just (not hard to do), they'll do it.

You cannot reason or trust terrorists. For example, Hamas has repeatedly called for peace with Israel only to rearm and ready itself for more attacks. The same with Bin Laden. You will never have a truce with terrorism, which is why analysts say that this is a war without victory. Either the terrorists keep performing terrorism, or they die. As sad as it is to think about, there really are people out there who not only don't want peace, but are willing to do whatever they can to make you think they want peace in order to fuck with you while they're attacking. It's more complex than German u-boats disguised as merchant marine ships. This is total Noriega/John Kerry style diplomacy. Bin Laden seems to think he can tap into the peace movement by saying "yes, you're right, we want peace too, it's just your government that doesn't." He's full of shit. Don't trust him.

As someone said above, it was very brave of you to post this. You asked a few questions that would take me a very long time to answer. I recommend doing a lot of reading, but if you're interested check out Why We Fight. It's in the theaters right now, and it discusses (at least for the first half) the military industrial complex in America. Very fascinating stuff, particularly the warning from Eisenhower predicting what eventually came to pass. The second half is largely shoddy journalism, but it does make some interesting points from time to time, particularly in how the CIA higher ups slanted their views towards finding evidence of WMD in Iraq.

For the record, we're in Iraq in order to reform the region. At least, that is the goal of the neocons: to prove that militaristic democratization is an affective region stabilizer, and that countries can be controlled and co-opted through American-style political values. For decades now we've taken a passive stance to the Middle East, only reacting to their aggression or manipulating their governments. The invasion of Afghanistan was the first active movement America has ever made in the region, and the neocons saw it as a doorway towards a more expansive scope of the Middle East. Wipe out the anti-American element at its source. Establish yourself as a power and influence in the region. Pay for it all with oil subsidies. It was a very bold plan (and yes, we invaded not for oil--we can get that cheap as dirt without the price of invading a country--but for power and influence).

Perhaps the most stricking demythification about the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions is that we have not seen a rise in terrorism. If you look at the statistics on terrorism for the past sixty years, it's remained constant, with occasional rises in 2001 (9/11) and after 2003 (easier access to targets). That to me scares me the most, because if we do fail in Iraq and the terrorists win and take over, they not only get another base from which to launch more attacks, but they won't quit. I'm very angry at the way the Bush administration has handled this war, but to put us in such a place where we must win--where an exit strategy might even be suicide for a decade or more--all based on pressured and incomplete evidence, it's just an utter travesty.

Why do people die for others' mistakes? I wish I could tell you. Russia burned the fields in WWII. We dropped thermite on civilians in Dresden. Saddam gased kurdish civilians. Turks massacred Greek cypriots. Genocide, ethnic hatred, power, influence, greed. People talk about the Iranian president's remarks like they're surprised this is coming from Iran, even though they've been asking for the destruction of Israel for years. I wish I could explain to you why people act this way, but even if I could I know it wouldn't change them. That's the saddest part about humanity, I suppose; we have to be who we are.

Anyway, enough of my talking. I hope at least some of this has been informative.