This ignores the basic facts of Islam. Lands that Muslims have conquered are in the House of Peace (dar al-Islam). Lands they haven’t conquered are in the House of War (dar al-harb) — to be conquered eventually. This is Allah’s mandate and promise to Muslims.

In Bin Laden’s first public speech after 9/11 he was still complaining bitterly about the fall of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) in which Christian forces retook Spain in 1492 — long before the US was founded.

Muslims will keep coming at any non-Islamic country or even other Muslims of the wrong sect. Usually Muslims have an excuse and explain themselves as victims, but basically that’s the way Islam rolls.

Ask the Jews in old Medina.
Ask the Christians in old Constantinople.

My wake-up call to leave the left was the archetypal post-9/11 article, “Why do they hate us?” Read the Quran, the Hadiths, even a decent encyclopedia article on the history Islam to know better.

It’s not Us; it’s Them.

Your speculations are specious. ;0

(E. g., see this important review of a biography of Richard Pipes:
https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/russia-and-the-solitary-historian
H/T Powerline blog.)

The same holds true with America’s relationship with the Shah of Iran (which is why Jimmy Carter’s decisions vis-à-vis that country in the late 70s—not to mention France’s role in the disaster) were so egregious.

With this in mind, while it is indisputable that Nixon’s decision (contra Kissinger) to resupply Israel as fast and as completely as possible enabled Israel to turn the tide in October 1973, why can’t this decision be viewed on several different levels, including geopolitics but also, perhaps even more importantly, as an issue of VISIBLY maintaining alliances, i.e., sustaining an ally in its hour of dire need?

IOW, we may be viewing 1973 through 21st-century eyes; IOW, conspiracy theory may often be very attractive—it may even be true in certain cases—but there are usually other reasons to explore, verify and analyze events (e.g., the Liberty attack). And needless to say, the USSR has since been supplanted by some other very bad actors.

I do have three questions, though, posed sincerely and not at all in an ironic or mocking manner:
1) What was the laissez faire policy of the U.S. government in re the Taliban between 1996 and 2001 that you refer to?
2) When did the attack of the U.S. by the Taliban that you refer to occur?
3) Regarding all the things you mention in your comment – economic and military support of Israel, economic support of Egypt, basing of troops in Saudi Arabia, the first Gulf War of 1991 – what American interests were served by any of them?

(1) We could have maintained normal diplomatic and trade relations with the countries in the region without underwriting any of them, participating in the overthrow of any of their governments, joining in any of their wars, or basing any of our troops there.
(2) Speculating about bin Laden’s mental impressions is a fool’s errand. My point in responding to “HC68” – and I have to believe you know this – was not that American foreign policy entered into those impressions, but rather that “HC68’s” suggestion that what happened on September 11, 2001, necessitated U.S. involvement in the Middle East stood the chronology of relevant events on its head because our country was deeply involved long before that atrocity. Our involvement wasn’t the efficient cause of the atrocity, but I don’t see how any thinking person could argue that it didn’t make it more likely that we would be the target of an attack.

— JDinPA

I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond to this nonsense, but here goes a partial reply:

Of course we were involved in the ME before 911. From cold necessity.

1. The enormous oil and natural gas reserves there make the region critical to the world economy. That’s a fact, not an opinion. There are other interesting resources in the region as well.

2. The region is centrally located in the ‘world island’ of Eurasia and Africa, and thus strategically important. During the Cold War, Soviet dominance over the ME would have been a major problem for the USA. Like it or not (and I don’t entirely like it) our economy is intricately interwoven with that of the rest of the world, and has been for well over a century. Even if we could get by without ME oil directly, enemy control of that oil, whether Soviet in the 20C or Islamist (or anyone else who does not care for us) still affects us in basic ways.

3. The ME, like it or not, is where the three main Abrahamic religions have their roots and where they come together in uncomfortable interactions now. ‘The West’ is short for ‘Western Christendom’, though our ruling class doesn’t like to remember that. Those religious forces will pull us back toward the ME even if we tried to wash our hands of it.

4. It’s trivially true that if we had taken a hands-off policy in the ME, 911 would not have happened. A lot of us would never have been born, either, for that matter. Such a world would be a different place at the detail level. But we and the Islamist movements would still have been hostile to each other, because we threaten the Islamists simply by existing. Instead of 911 would have come other attacks.

Even if we had never had significant troops or personnel or economic interests there, our TV shows and music and culture would still directly impinge on them. It’s a small world after all, as the song goes, post Industrial Revolution. We can’t avoid affecting each other.

The same issue applied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, we undercut the Communists just by existing, and visibly being richer, freer, and more secure than they were. That all by itself made a mockery of Communist boasts about being the new scientific social policy.

In some ways, it’s worse with the Islamists. Not all Muslims necessarily subscribe to the core tenets of Islamism, but those tenets do have some Koranic support. Christianity makes no promises to its adherents of supremacy in this world. Indeed, we are promised that in many times and places we would be persecuted. Likewise, Christianity can acknowledge a separate ‘temporal’ (meaning temporary) secular authority that is not automatically illegitimate. The ‘two swords’ doctrine goes back to the Middle Ages.

The strains of Muslim belief embraced by the fundamentalist Islamists do maintain that Islam should be supreme in this world. This makes the objective fact of Western political, technological, and social primacy in this world something like an existential challenge. Either their particular strains of Islam are wrong, or something is demonically wrong in the world to permit such perversion to prosper.

So no, they would not be willing, or even able, to ‘leave us alone if we leave them alone’, save on a very temporary basis, and that would be true without regard to our own policies there.

Defenders of Islam often claim that Islam is tolerant of other Abrahamic faiths. That’s a half truth. Historically, there have been times when Jews fled Christian lands to Islamic ones because they were less persecuted there, but that was centuries ago and a different world.

Likewise, the ‘tolerance’ of the Islamists requires that Christians and Jews live in ‘dhimmitude’. Dhimmitude has meant different things in different times and places, ranging from ‘not so bad’ to ‘ghastly’, but it explicitly rejects any equality.

(Note also that ‘live in dhimmitude’ is the tolerant strain of Islamist fanaticism, the hard-core think more in terms of ‘convert or die’.)

Have Western, and American, policies in the ME sometimes been counterproductive? Of course. No political policies are ever perfect.

But that’s not the source of the hatred.

Which brings us to Israel.

The region hates Israel for two main reasons. One is that it is specifically a Jewish state that does not live in dhimmitude. The old religious divides.

The other reason is that Israel is also a basically Western nation-state, richer, more powerful, more technically advanced, more politically and socially potent, than their Islamist neighbors. It’s the same acid bath that the USA generates for them, only right next door.

Which means that no, we could not get peace from the Islamists by abandoning Israel. It would just be a massive signal of weakness.

We just don’t have, and have not had for well over a century, the option of disengaging from the Middle East.