US global power and its track record of military interventions (currently over 400) give the IMF and the World Bank immense power over indebted countries. Developing countries are forced to divert funds to debt repayments and focus their economies on industries that can earn foreign exchange, primarily resource extraction. Western standards of living are consequently sustained at the expense of health, education and social services in developing nations.

Radical terrorist groups in part fill this vacuum in social services. Hamas in Palestine, Madrassas (religious schools) in Pakistan and Hezbollah in Lebanon are three Muslim examples. Without alternatives grateful civilian populations adopt these organisations ideology and hatred of the west. Providing a steady stream of suicide bombers.

This hatred is reinforced by the central goal of US foreign policy, the preservation of its disproportionate consumption of world resources. In the Middle East this resource is oil, a commodity that with only 5% of the world’s population the US consumes a quarter of the world’s output. America has systematically denied the people of the Middle East the right of self-determination that it pretends to so treasure. Repressive and brutal regimes have been financially supported while democracies have been undermined. Aid to Yemen was cut off within months of the newly unified country’s first democratic election in 1990. US support was instead directed to its “twin towers”, Saudi Arabia and Iran (later replaced by Iraq). Support for each has backfired dramatically with first the Iranian Revolution, then the Gulf War and finally September 11 (the majority of the hijackers were Saudi’s).

Why? These regimes served only to enrich themselves and their Western corporate backers leaving the majority of the region’s people dispossessed and destitute. Denied human and democratic rights, living in poverty and excluded from any share of the immense wealth that gulf oil generates these people have generated an intense hatred of the west. A hatred that makes death for what they see as a good cause a welcome relief.

We have the power to stop this cycle by changing our foreign policies and transforming our selfish and exploitative consumer based societies. Start today by distributing this message and by altering your lifestyle.

Source unknown (sent by a Net friend, July 2002)