@filmfann – Unless there’s a quote I DIDN’T hear, I believe his post 9/11 quote didn’t say anything even remotely like “we deserved it.” What he said was that everyone was writing off these suicide bombers as “cowards”, and call them whatever you want, but someone who is willing to slam themselves into a building at several hundred miles an hour for what they believe in is not exactly a “coward”. Your comment just illustrates how people take things out of context. Now, if he DID say something else about why we may have “deserved” it, I’m kind of doubtful he used that language or even implied that. But I can give you an example of an argument which could EASILY be misquoted or misconstrued as “we deserved it”, and it goes like this.
Christmas 1979, Afghanistan was engaged in a civil war, and in the midst of the chaos Russia decided to invade and replace the head of the government the Muslim opposition was trying to push back, and of course being heavily financed and armed, it was pretty much a bloodbath. Russians went after Afghans in what can only be called a genocide, firing after anything that moved with their helicopters. They would also target the Afghan children, knowing that an injured child, say with missing limbs, would require people to tend to them, people who would be able to fight back if they weren’t tending to injured children. Furthermore, Afghanistan was DIRT poor, and they were trying to fight back the 2nd largest superpower on the planet with weaponry which was as much as a century old. It was a positively HORRIBLE atrocity. The UN couldn’t pass a resolution against it however because Russia vetoed it. And what did the US, the most powerful country in the world, a country with a vested interest in everything Russia did at the time, do? They basically ignored it. The US banned the export of grain to Russia, they pulled out of strategic arms limitations talks, and they boycotted the Olympics in Moscow.
So, why didn’t they do more (at first)? Well, because they realized because of how the Afghan landscape was, very rugged and mountainous, essentially Russia had gotten themselves into their own Vietnam, and the US LOVED that. But eventually someone got the right people involved and over the course of the next 7–8 years, US funding went from $5 million to $500 million matched by the Saudi’s, arms were purchased with the involvement of many countries in a very under the table fashion which kept the Russians from knowing our involvement (because we didn’t want the Cold War to become a REAL war) and by I believe 1987 or 1988, the Russians pulled out, effectively dealing them the first defeat of the Russian army ever.
In the meantime, people like Bin Laden were coming to power in the vacuum that was left behind, but all these future leaders of Al Quaeda and the Taliban really had little idea of how instrumental the US was in driving back the Russian aggression, but what they did know about it, they realized that the US justification for doing ANYTHING at all was mostly self interest, any good intentions we had were masked by the way we did things, and when these future Al Quaeda leaders came to power, they saw pretty much a country which originally was dirt poor, but which now was utterly destroyed…schools, hospitals, anything essential they once had was GONE. And the US on whom they were able to count on for half a billion in funding when the Russians were there, couldn’t get a thin dime out of the US. One million dollars in funding to rebuild schools couldn’t even get to the floor of our Congress. It seemed that the US was pretty much concerned with the cold war with Russia, but didn’t give a slim fuck about this poor nation whose people had been ravaged, raped, murdered, dismembered, etc…..we came in, escalated things to the point where the destruction of the nation was almost complete, and then dropped them like a red headed stepchild once we had vanquished OUR enemy.
So, these people came of age and came to power being of the impression (and not a wholly misguided one), that the US’ talk about being a force for good, fighting back against human rights violations in the world, was all a bunch of bullshit. At our hearts, a million dollars out of a budget of hundreds of billions was too much to ask to help out a country which genuinely needed it, yet when it served our purposes, half a billion was not. Our entire society in fact was in the heart of the ME decade, there was a lot of conspicous consumption in our culture, we clearly valued money first, power second, and somewhere way down the list, human rights of non-Americans. From their perspective, it was a fair assessment (hell, from MINE it’s a fair assessment).
So, we became the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the world, as the last remaining superpower, we spent over 10 years following our dropping the ball wielding our power like we owned the fucking world. And these people resent the fuck out of us, and were hell bent on teaching us a lesson.
So, did we “deserve” it? No, no one deserves that. But can I see how they could have thought we deserved it? Sure. Can it be argued that we brought on their wrath? Yes, indeed it can. And I suspect if Maher said ANYTHING besides pointing out that suicide bombing is not a “cowardly” act, I’m willing to bet it was in relation to this situation which the US had a HUGE hand in creating.
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