Today we look back nine years at the day when four commercial jets were used as weapons against the United States.

For me, the most difficult (but ultimately, the most rewarding) conclusion to make has been that the policy choices of the United States, NATO, and Israel (in short, the Free World) toward the Arab/Muslim world, policy choices which have amounted to, broadly, wholesale manipulation (supporting Al-Qaeda against Russia, supporting the Shah against the Iranians, consistently supporting the Saudis, and on and on and on) and occupation (the West Bank, Gaza, the first Gulf War, and on and on and on) for the purposes of geopolitical advantage, contributed enormously, from a causal standpoint, to the events of 9/11.

Of course, to borrow the favorite phrase of our current President, let me be clear: the 9/11 terrorists still did it. They’re still murderers of innocents, and thus they have earned the condemnation of history. I have been accused in the past by angry commenters of stripping the people of the Middle East of any causal power, and I do not seek to do that. But to deny that our callous, reckless actions in that region provided al-Qaeda’s recruiters with an irresistible narrative is to simply blindfold oneself to history.

And, as I have argued multiple times, that’s what makes the Free World’s actions in the Middle East since 9/11 so face-smackingly awful: they’ve only strengthened, made all the more salient, the evidence for that narrative.

Imagine you’re a 14-year-old, haughty and reckless and naive, and impressionable, as most kids of that age are (I know I was). As fire rains from the sky from vehicles that you’ve never seen before in your country, as people in uniforms you’ve never seen before in your country approach your home, screaming in a language that you don’t understand, to take your older brother out of your home and into their truck and away; just then an older man from your town and your country, perhaps a spiritual leader, but most importantly a native and a native speaker of your own language; this man tells you: “they’re not trying to save you, even though they’ll tell you that. They’re trying to exploit you, and exploit our land. And they’ll kill you if you get in their way. The only way to show the world what they’ve done is to attack them, to try to bring some of our pain to their lands, to their people. It’s only fair. It’s vengeance.”

First, consider what you would do in that situation, given that choice. Second, consider how similar that choice is to the choice our political leaders and our media gave us in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The difference is that most of us were adults (although I was 12, around the age of the kid in my hypothetical), we lived in a relatively prosperous, free, and powerful society, and thus the response we gave to that choice was far more devastating than any the kid in my hypothetical, or the groups he may have joined up with, could hope to give. On 9/11 we lost almost 3,000 civilians; but we’ve killed tens of thousands of civilians in our ensuing War on Terror, scores more foreign fighters, and we’ve lost scores of our own troops. Similarly, when Israel went to war with Hamas in Gaza in late 2008, Hamas and other militants killed thirteen Israelis, while Israel killed about 1500 Gazans (most of them civilians).

This bloodshed is incomprehensible. These wars are stupid, expensive, and wrong. Undoubtedly the public sentiment after 9/11 was such that our political leaders couldn’t have simply done nothing, but how much of that sentiment was their own doing, and the media’s doing? And why couldn’t we have, for instance, carried out one major military strike targeting those connected to the 9/11 terrorists and been done with it? Instead, we’re engaged in long, bloody, no-end-in-sight occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq (and Pakistan, and Yemen, and Somalia), occupations which are portents of the next 9/11.

This topic calls for much more than a blog post, but consider this an initial sketch. In my view, what we ought to “never forget” is what we did to encourage the last 9/11, and what we’re doing to encourage the next. Never forget what we’ve done to our current and future course as a nation and the futures of all those impressionable young kids in the Middle East.

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