In his Feb. 9th article, Pat Buchanan said something that struck me as profound coming from a conservative:
…al-Qaida was no more attacking our “freedom” when it drove those planes into the World Trade Center than were Iroquois, Sioux and Apache attacking our freedom when they massacred settlers on the frontier. Like Islamists, the Indians saw us as defiling their sacred soil, dispossessing them, imposing a hated hegemony. They cared not about our Constitution – they wanted us off their land.
This seems to strengthen Ward Churchill’s incendiary remarks from an essay he wrote that basically states Newton’s Third Law of Motion that states “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Our country’s policies towards the Middle East may have caused 9/11. Plain and simple. Hell, bin Laden basically said as much in his Oct. 2004 video (and before anyone accuses me of “hating America” let me say that I despise the attacks of 9/11. They were committed by cowards and I do NOT approve of bin Laden, nor of al-Qaeda and their tactics):
Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom.
If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example – Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don’t possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 – may Allah have mercy on them.
No, we fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.
Pat Buchanan may not be my favorite person, but he has a point here:
The president says we must fight them over there, so we do not have to fight them over here. But, before we invaded Iraq, not one American had been killed by an Iraqi in a dozen years. Since we invaded, 1,500 Americans have died and the number of insurgents has multiplied from 5,000 to 20,000. By Don Rumsfeld’s own metric, our intervention is creating more terrorists than we are killing. We are fighting a guerrilla army that our own invasion called into being.
I just wish that someone within the Bush Administration might show some common sense about Iraq and, if nothing else, at least admit that our own actions may be the cause of all of the American lives lost in Iraq to date. The problem seems to be that “Texans” don’t like to lose face.
