Victor Davis Hanson is right as usual:
We in the United States preened that we were the “honest broker.” After the Camp David accords we tried to be an intermediary to both sides, ignoring that one party had created a liberal and democratic society, while the other remained under the thrall of a tribal gang.
Billions of dollars poured into frontline states like Jordan and Egypt. Arafat himself got tens of millions, though none of it ever seemed to show up in good housing, roads, or power plants for his people. The terror continued, enhanced rather than arrested, by Western largess and Israeli concessions.
Then the Islamists declared war on the United States. A quarter century of mass murdering of Americans followed in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, the first effort to topple the World Trade Center, and the attack on the USS Cole.
We gave billions to Jordan, the Palestinians, and the Egyptians. Afghanistan was saved from the Soviets through U.S. aid. Kuwait was restored after Saddam’s annexation, and the holocaust of Bosnians and Kosovars halted by the American Air Force. Americans welcomed thousands of Arabs to our shores and allowed hundreds of madrassas and mosques to preach zealotry, anti-Semitism, and jihad without much scrutiny.
Then came September 11 and the almost instant canonization of bin Laden.
Suddenly, the prior cheap shots at Israel under siege weren’t so cheap. It proved easy to castigate Israelis who went into Jenin, but not so when we needed to do the same in Fallujah.
It was easy to slander the Israelis’ scrutiny of Arabs in their midst, but then suddenly a few residents in our own country were found to be engaging in bomb making, taking up jihadist pilgrimages to Afghanistan, and mapping out terrorist operations.
Worth reading in its entirety.
(via Democracy for the Middle East)
The real problem we face in understanding Islamic terror is that we insist on putting an ethnocentric interpretation on their acts. Essentially, many people believe that Osama Bin Laden thinks and believes like a Left-wing academic in a Western university.
He does not.
The actions of external actors are not what drives the Jihadist. They seek power and status within the Islamic world itself. They attack non-muslims as a means of raising their status in the Islamic world. Any non-Muslim will do for that purpose. Any justifications aimed at the external actors are mere fig leafs. They pick the safest targets and then create justifications later.
There is a delusion popular in many circles that holds that if someone attacks you they must have a perfectly valid reason for doing so. You must have done something to tick them off otherwise why would they attack you? The idea that political groups might strike at targets at targets of opportunity propelled by their own internal motivations in the manner of a serial-rapist is wholly alien to them.
Breaking Islamic terror means making terrorism not the route to status, power and glory but the route to shame, humiliation and oblivion. Nothing else will block the internal drives that create terrorism.