I had watched President Bush on television assuring America that we were attacked because “they hate our freedoms.” But the very question was misguided: everywhere I went in the Muslim world, our freedoms weren’t hated, but envied. The bitterness was not aimed at Americans, or our democratic values, as Bush claimed. It was at our callous misuse of power, our continued willingness to prop up dictatorships in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia that denied their people the very democracy we purported to want to spread. It wasn’t “us” they hated, but our policies.
