Editorial We won; they hate us

We are so used to thinking of ourselves as the good guys, it is hard to imagine why Americans are hated by millions of Muslims around the world.

They have better targets of their rage closer to home, at least by our standards.

Mercedes and Lamborghinis blast by dirty children through villages with dirt roads. Political power is given from father to son. Justice is dispensed by a preacher with the blade of a sword. Women can be stoned to death for adultery.

Why hate us?

It wasn't so long ago that the world was divided in two: totalitarian states led by the communist Soviet Union, and the "free world" of the west, led by the United States. Each had "client" states around the world.

They had Cuba in our hemisphere, we had the Shah's Iran in theirs. We had Israel in the Mideast, while many Arab states fell into the camp of the Soviets. It was a coldly calculated power struggle. Oil was a prize on the board.

We pumped $3 billion of guns into Afghanistan to bog down the Soviets, then walked away from the suffering when our client won. We supported Iraq, after the fall of the Shah, when Iran was our enemy.

Then, we won. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, China greeted capitalism, and suddenly, the great game changed.

But not the poverty in the streets of Egypt. Not the homelessness of Palestinians whose olive orchards were bulldozed for settlements in Israel. Not the rifles and land mines in Afghanistan.

The billions of rubles that once flowed into these lands dried up. Planned economies faltered. Corruption festered.

In many Arab countries the majority of the population is under 25 years old. They have no memory of the "Cold War" and much of what they know is taught to them by Mullahs whose power is threatened by liberty, their culture threatened by the "decadence" of the West.

We became the target.

Those Arabs who achieved a middle class status at home and are able to travel to Europe or the United States are often met with bigotry and treated like second-class citizens because of their darker skin.

We showed them no respect.

One of the primary mechanisms of change in the West, capital investment in a free market, is not available in the Arab world. Their primary commodity is not the labor of people but oil, which is controlled by relatively few at the very top of their society.

We fostered that injustice.

And that society is kept docile at home by a controlled press that feeds hatred and xenophobia to its masses, that blames the U.S. for their poverty, for the bigotry abroad, for the plight of Palestinians.

We were indifferent.

Now, millions of Arabs own nothing but their rage, and no target is more worthy of such a rage than America, the last remaining superpower.

That was one of the unanticipated consequences of our victory in the Cold War. We won, and there was no one left besides us who was big enough to blame for everything that is wrong in the Arab world. Did we really expect them to thank us for our victory?

Instead we became the Great Satan, because things aren't right and blaming history is just so unsatisfying.

Besides, blaming history would focus young Arabs on the future, on making changes at home, which terrifies the old Arabs who own the Palaces and the Mosques.

Instead, they hate. They have reasons, good and bad, but that hate is constant, it is deep, and it does not make a distinction between those who have compassion for them and those who hate them in return.

There is no easy solution. True change will require individual liberty, in lands where we have often allied ourselves with the oppressor.

Change will require us to give up our textile industry in South Carolina and buy Mideast cotton and wool and clothes, as well as oil.

We need to help people dig deeper wells, desalinate the sea, and let Arab women travel to Europe and the U.S. and return home with revolutionary ideas such as being able to vote.

It won't happen that way, of course. Instead, we are on a collision course of rage, their rage at injustice and our rage that they would target those of us trying only to feed our families.

And now the rage is evolving into a truly religious war, where everyone claims God is on their side, a vortex of hate that threatens to draw civilization into its maw.