Thoughts on "blaming America" I don't agree with the lefties when they state that unjust American foreign policy contributed to 9/11. The suggestion that Osama bin Laden was somehow striking back for US actions in Vietnam or El Salvador is ludicrous. If anything, bin Laden should have been grateful to us for saving Saudi Arabia from Iraq during Gulf War 1 and for giving him Stinger missiles to defend Afghanistan against the USSR invasion. However, like most memes, the contention that there are people around the world with a reason to hold a grudge against the US has more than a kernel of truth. The more reasonable of the lefties have a point when they say that the US sponsored a number of repressive regimes around the world during the Cold War. This criticism is usually made in a vacuum as it totally neglects the Soviet presence over that 50 year period. Nevertheless, it makes a big impression on college students, especially when it's told without an explanation or condemnation of what the other (far worse) side was doing. I think there needs to be an intellectual response by the right to the charges that the US betrayed every ideal with its Cold War campaigns. I'm not well educated enough in the history of Chile/Bolivia/etc. to filter fact from fiction, but if this area of history is abandoned to the left and glossed over or omitted by the right, then it will inevitably be twisted to help the left's cause. Maybe it'd be worth going through this list of supposed atrocities committed by the US compiled by the "friendly" communists over at ZMag, just to debunk them one by one. Godless adds: I don't expect that every item on the Zmag list is a fabrication, but certainly some of them are; for example, the attack on the Cole (!) is listed as yet another example of US imperialism. Some of those events were real US atrocities, and some of them were not, but I don't trust the hard lefties at Zmag to tell me which is which.