"6" Years Later, what is the Lesson of 9/11?

While the attacks on New York and Washington can never be justified since they clearly violated the first and second principles of the Natural Law--do good/avoid evil and treat your neighbor fairly, it must in all intellectual honesty be admitted that the blatantly imperialistic foreign policy of the United States including the garrisoning of American troops on Muslim soil (prior to the first gulf war) was the precipitating factor. This much is known beyond reasonable doubt if only by examination of the numerous public pre-9/11 statements of Osama bin Laden. In addition, copious data now exist which establish the same, well presented by many among the academic foreign policy community. See my War, Peace and Terrorism for references.

Had it not been for our uneven support of right wing Israeli (Likud) politics over those of the Arab Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and our decades long interference in the affairs of Arab and Iranian governments, 9/11 might not have occurred. This is painful to admit yet rationally demanded nonetheless upon examination of the historical record and in the absence of a-priori bias in favor of what now is the ascendant Neoconservative policy views of both US political parties.

The answer to so-called "Jihadi based terrorism" is not to be found in further immoral wars of aggression or the occupation of additional Arab lands but in the return to a humble foreign policy in which war is engaged in as a last resort for defensive purposes only. This means a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive (preventive) war at a minimum. It also implies that a paradigm shift in US energy policy is absolutely imperative! The fact that global fossil fuel reserves (primarily concentrated in the Middle East) are likely to last less than 30 more years strongly suggests that American presence in the Persian Gulf area is primarily energy related.

The United States simply does not have the moral right or the necessary resources to monopolize the distribution of increasingly scant hydrocarbon energy reserves.