One of the first things my wife said to me after the terrorist attacks on September 11, was, "Why would anyone want to do such a thing? What have we done to make them hate us so much?" And this is something I think many Americans have been wondering over the past few weeks. So I thought I'd address it.

I hope that this atrocity will cause more Americans to become aware of things. Specifically, to become more aware of how our country treats other countries. I know it's not a fascinating subject. Foreign policy can bore me to tears, that's for sure. But no one can hope to understand the rationale behind the attacks without learning these things. Without this understanding, we simply label the attacks with a simple summary. Religious fanaticism, for example. But it's not as cut and dried as that.

I am by no means an expert on foreign policy. In fact, I wouldn't even say I'm qualified to talk about it at all. But I can identify bullshit when I smell it, and quite a lot of it has been floating around. Our President, for example, said on national television that Osama bin Laden hates America because we have freedom, freedoms his people don't have. And I've also heard it said that he hates capitalism, which is why the World Trade Center was targeted.

The stink of bullshit in those statements is overwhelming. Osama bin Laden is a multi-millionaire. He loves capitalism. And the "freedom hating" thing is just so insipid that I can't believe anyone would fall for it.

No, the truth behind his hatred of America (a hatred shared by many in that part of the world) is much more complex than that.

One first has to be aware that America is not a very kind nation sometimes. Oh, America can be wonderful. We're always offering aid to nations in need. We rebuild enemy nations after waging war on them. But sometimes we're not so nice. Sometimes we're pricks. When it comes right down to it, America can be a bully.

While it's not a nice thing to admit, we engage in our own sorts of terrorism against other countries, terrorism that similarly targets innocents, just not in as flamboyant a fashion. We place economic embargoes against Iraq or Cuba or (insert name of country here), because we're upset with their government for one reason or another. Who suffers for this? Mostly children. The UN estimates that 5000 Iraqi children have died every month since the end of Desert Storm, due to the embargoes against necessities. Embargoes created by America.

And let's look at wars for a moment. There's a lot of talk right now of military action, even if innocents are killed. There are those (including myself) who are deeply opposed to this. But our country as an entity certainly isn't. In 1945, we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which killed upwards of 75,000 instantaneously, and many, many more from radiation poisoning over the ensuing weeks and months. Then Nagasaki, with 40,000 killed outright, as well as the following lingering deaths. The vast majority of these deaths were not soldiers. They were children, women, and non-military men.

Four million Koreans died in the Korean War, most of which were deaths caused by American carpet bombing. Carpet bombing killed predominantly civilians.

America, the caring nation, often doesn't care about anything except its own greedy interests. Korea was no threat to America. But we fought there because we were fighting against communism (which was also not a threat to America, but that's not the topic here). If innocents had to die to stop the red scourge, so be it. That was our rather asinine mentality.

Let's look at Desert Storm again. Why were we there? For oil. Our own greed, once again, resulting in the deaths of others.

And America is hypocritical. We will put in place sanctions and embargoes against nations as a way to punish them (which is idiotic to begin with), but only against nations with whom we don't freely trade. Do we trade with the middle east? Nope. We buy their oil, but they buy nothing from us. (Unless you count weapons, and let's not even get started on that.) So we bully them, because we can.

On the other hand, we don't bully China, a nation with a gross history of human rights violations. Instead, we consistently give them "Most Favored Nation" status, ensuring that we'll trade with them and smile all the while. China has over a billion consumers, after all.

America is perceived, and not without plenty of justification, as being in favor of freedoms for some, but not for all. One doesn't have to look any further than within our own country to see evidence of this, but outside the US, it's even more pronounced.

But possibly the single biggest cause of Arab hatred of America is the USA's long-standing and unwavering support of Israel. We support them politically in the UN, we support them financially (well over $800 million a year), and of course, we support their military, giving them access to our weaponry and giving them bunches of money. But Israel oppresses Arab rights, occupying most Palestinian territories and controlling Islamic shrines in Jerusalem. Since Jerusalem is one of Islam's holiest of cities, this is not much liked by Muslims.

And so now the issue of religion enters, and it's certainly a big issue. Bin Laden and his cohorts see non-Muslims as being enemies of Allah who are to be destroyed. Especially the Israelis. Non-Muslims are viewed as Satanic, you see. (Rather similar to the views of America's ultra-conservative fundamentalists, I'd say.)

Again, I'm no expert. But this sort of information (and much, much more) is readily available to anyone who takes the time to do a modicum of research. America is, it shames me to say, guilty of many crimes against Arab people. I do not for even an instant pretend to say that we "deserved" the terrorist attacks against us. Absolutely not. But I do think that unless we take a good hard look at the reasons behind the attacks, and start treating other nations more fairly, we can only expect similar attacks upon us. And no "War on Terrorism" will prevent it.