lurkerfan

This thoughtful analysis of Osama Bin Laden's latest video message and his whole strategy in the Middle East makes an awful lot of sense.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone in the White House or in Congress read it with an open mind?  They might even agree with Pogo's epiphany:  We have found the enemy and he is us.

In those anguished days following 9/11/2001, I wrote a letter to our local paper published under the headline "Why do they hate us?"  Although I was lamentably ignorant of U.S. policy in the Middle East, the one thing I remembered from my undergraduate psychology class -- "all behavior has a CAUSE" -- suggested to me that perhaps our enemies had a point of view that we need to consider.  My only clue at the time was the TV news image of Palestinian boys armed with rocks attacking Israeli soldiers armed with every known implement of modern warfare.  I didn't actually say that our unthinking and total support of Israel was a mistake, but my intuition certainly suggested it to me.

It's always nice to find writers brilliant enough to agree with my intuition, but the referenced article provides a much more thorough discussion of many issues involved in the complex politics of the Middle East.  Besides the Israeli question, he hits two more of my major concerns:  the decline of the U.S. as the dominant economic and military world power and the social and cultural danger of allowing major corporations to run the world.