There was plenty of warning before the World Trade Center attack.

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There was plenty of warning before the World Trade Center attack.

When the World Trade Center was bombed the first time, on February 26, 1993, it was discovered that the bombing was done by associates of Osama bin Laden.

Why does a Saudi Arabian like Bin Laden care about the activities of the U.S.? In interviews, he has said that he is against the U.S. support for what he considers to be a corrupt Saudi Arabian government. I certainly would be unlikely to give credibility to anything Bin Laden said. However, Saudi Arabian friends have privately made similar criticisms. That's what made me take notice. My Saudi friends said things about the government in Saudi Arabia like what is said in the article Friendly Dictators [thirdworldtraveler.com]. (Once the page loads, do a search for the second instance of "Fahd", King Fahd.) Here is a quote:

Control over the lives of their citizens is total and arbitrary. Torture is common, and amputation is frequently ordered by the courts.

The September 13, 2001 PBS TV show Hunting bin Laden [pbs.org] presented some of these issues. Here is a quote from a transcript of the show [pbs.org]:

NARRATOR: Muslim fundamentalists say that America's alliance with King Fahd is akin to America's disastrous alliance with the Shah of Iran. When King Fahd, like the Shah, is forced from power, they say, Americans will be on the wrong side of history.

and here's another quote:

NARRATOR: Already, critics of the Saudi government point out the king has managed to turn the world's largest oil producer into a debtor nation.

People like Bin Laden say that the U.S. government is supporting a corrupt dictatorship. The U.S. government is in fact supporting an anti-democratic government that denies representation to most of its citizens.

The terrorists say the lack of representation is the reason they feel motivated to violence. Initiators of violence are mentally de-centered. Terrorist violence deserves absolutely zero sympathy. However, that doesn't mean that everything terrorists think is wrong. Their complaints are shared by many people who are not terrorists. In this case the terrorist's complaints have elements of reasonableness; it is their methods that are wrong.

If Americans support U.S. independence from England in 1776, they might also be sympathetic to other people's desire to have representational government.

Consider what the narrator of the PBS show said again: Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil-producing nation, with only 17,500,000 citizens, actually owes money.

Citizens of Saudi Arabia want to be able to try to change the political structure of their country. They want to do this without U.S. interference. This is not an unreasonable request. Certainly if the Saudi government tried to involve itself in a political dispute in the U.S., the U.S. would put forward whatever resistance was necessary to stop the interference.

For years there have been Arabs who have said that if the U.S. continued interfering, there would be attempts to bring the conflict to the U.S. After years of warning, that's what happened.

It seems self-destructive that there is in the U.S. little serious consideration of complaints that come from outside. People in the U.S. expect to have self-determination, even if what they choose is not what other countries would choose. Should the U.S. deny that right to other countries?

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