At Camp Pendleton last week, Dick Cheney stated that “terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness.” Nonsense! If that were true, the 2001 attacks would have happened anywhere else but here. The US was and is the strongest nation militarily and financially; the targets were the very symbols of that strength. It is not weakness, but the heavy-handed misuse of strength that invites attacks.

Strength can be used to empower others and build them up, inspiring partnership and mutuality. Or it can be used to bully others and control them, which inspires hatred and revenge. The first use of strength builds hope, the second, hopelessness. And hopeless people do desperate things.

At the time of the 2001 attacks, Middle Eastern hostility toward the US was primarily based on US support of Israel’s right to security over and above Palestine’s right to an unoccupied sovereign state. That continues to be a core issue. Bush’s support of Sharon, as he bulldozes Gaza, adds to his illegal settlements and walls off other parts of the Palestinian West Bank, is deepening the resentment among Arabs and Muslims.

In the background are decades of US employment of puppet bullies (the Shah, Saddam), no matter what they did to their people, in order to control Mideast oil.

The average US citizen has no grasp of what US actions and policies in the Middle East mean to those who suffer from them, and no grasp of the hatred they inspire. We need to know this: as long as our government uses strength in a heavy-handed, bullying way, that strength will continue to spread hatred and hopelessness. And it is hatred and hopelessness in response to a bully that breed vengeful suicidal attacks.

After the 2001 attacks, the US had a choice: we could have used intelligence to find and bring to trial those who planned and subsidized the attacks (they are still free) while reaching out to the larger Arab and Muslim community, people who were not responsible, to deal with their justified grievances. We could have used our strength to apologize for past harm, to heal old wounds, and to empower the peoples of the Middle East to work toward their own goals—dialogue without bullying, sovereignty without occupation, and control of their own resources. That use of strength could have eventually led to respectful cooperation, could have built hope.

We could have joined with all the other nations that shared our shock and grief, acknowledged that we are all in this together, reaffirmed the treaties we had just (since January 2001) renounced, and invested our billions in attacking hunger, disease, and other causes of despair. That use of strength could have built hope.

Instead, we repeated the kind of bullying that inspired hatred in the first place. We invaded a country that posed no threat but had enviable oil reserves. We killed twelve thousand civilians (a new study says 37,000) , imprisoned tens of thousands, most without reason (Red Cross), permitted a systematic pattern of torture and abuse (Taguba report, Red Cross, civil rights groups). We have co-opted Iraqi oil, dictated their constitution, shut out opposing views, and are digging in with several permanent military bases.

Now the US has appointed another longtime CIA-backed strongman (with similar credentials as Saddam Hussein had when he was hired), widely distrusted by the Iraqi people, as prime minister. A week before he took office, Mr. Allawi is reported to have shot dead 6 alleged but as yet untried insurgents. Is this democracy? Does this herald the dawn of human rights and the rule of law in Iraq? Or does that matter as long as he answers to us?

"Sixteen months ago, Iraq was a gathering threat to the United States and the civilized world. Now it is a rising democracy, an ally in the war on terror and the American people are safer for it," or so claims Dick Cheney.

That may be all we see in the mainstream media; what does the rest of the world see? Before the 2003 US invasion, Iraq was not a threat to anyone. Now it’s a puppet state pretending to be a democracy, a cash cow for US corporations policed by a hired thug who will protect their interests.

The Iraqi people still have only sporadic electricity and sewage in the streets, but they have, thanks to KBR contracts, several growing US military bases, and the world’s largest US embassy. A strong majority of Iraqis think of the US as occupiers, not allies. Any Iraqis who want their country to be free from US military and corporate control have no voice, no place, and no hope.

Middle Eastern Arabs and Muslims, and other peoples around the world, see the “preemptive” war policy to mean that whenever the US government wants a country, for its resources or strategic advantage, it can label that country a threat and use military strength to take it. As in Iraq, truth need not stand in the way. That fear, and the announcement that the US is building a new class of nuclear weapons, is feeding a new arms race.

US strength is being used to bully and control, to attack and to steal, to stand outside international law. It is engendering fear and resentment, hate and hopelessness. Halliburton and its KBR subsidiary are richer for it, but the Iraqi people are not free, and we are not safer.

Virginia Curran Hoffman, PhD, LMFT (vhoffman@calcon.net) is a senior lecturer at Loyola University Chicago.

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