A rchive Date
[ 22-09-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mulroney.html
Don't blame America
U.S.-Mideast power balance not behind 9/11
By BEN MULRONEY - For the Sun
September 22, 2002
America and her allies decided to pick on a weaker nation. They pillaged its land, raped its economy and took advantage of its fragile diplomatic standing. They kicked it when it was down, spat in its face and laughed at its despair, only to awaken one day and notice that the smaller nation wasn't going to take it anymore. It would fight back - by any means necessary.
According to a recent publication, that is the way a great many North Americans view the timeline leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center. It was written that nearly 75% of Americans feel that U.S. foreign policy regarding the Middle East contributed to the attacks of last September.
These people are wrong.
Let us rewind, not to 2001, but to the years between World War I and World War II.
The German aggressors, having suffered defeat at the hands of the Allies, were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, in which the nation promised to take full responsibility for the war in Europe and to pay reparations to all who suffered at the hands of its war machine.
German land was to be occupied and its army all but decommissioned. When the bottom fell out of the stock market in 1929, things only got worse in Germany.
With unemployment rising and inflation skyrocketing, a young army corporal named Adolf Hitler was busy recruiting members into his new political movement and the rest is history of the darkest kind. Many stops on the road to war could have been different.
The United States could have taken a more active role in international relations following World War I. The West could have absolved Germany of its financial obligations, in order to ease the consequences of the Great Depression. We could even have assassinated Hitler before he was ever able to dream of the Holocaust.
But we would never go so far as to suggest that those historical points of debate are the root causes of Nazism.
Hitler and Hitler alone took advantage of a war-weary and tired community of nations to consolidate power, to establish the Third Reich and to open the gates of hell. To say otherwise would be to turn the most vicious and evil of human beings into nothing more than a vessel for our shortcomings as a nation.
To do so would be an insult to the victims of Nazi tyranny.
The same can and must be said of Osama bin Laden. The power relationship between the West and the Middle East is not to blame for Sept. 11.
For anyone to suggest that U.S. foreign policy was the straw that broke Osama's back is buying into his destructive train of thought.
Bin Laden's dream was to kill us all and any excuse to justify that perverted dream is just that: An excuse. He would blame his blood thirst on a vitamin deficiency, if he thought we would believe him.
Financial and social inequality exists around the globe. It is perhaps a silver lining to the dark cloud that has been looming over us for just over a year, that our eyes have been opened to these global inequities, but to extend that awakening to a sort of continental mea culpa, is as wrong as reassigning the blame for the evils of past tyrants.
Read Mulroney on Sundays. Reach him at bmulroney@canoemail.com Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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