My letter published today in the Monterey County Herald:

I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in suggesting that the reason Americans are being targeted and killed in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries in the Middle East might have something to do with our overwhelming presence in their region. The United States and other Western powers have been attacking, occupying, and otherwise interfering with these oil-rich countries for decades now, and most of the people there are understandably sick of us. I daresay Americans wouldn’t appreciate Egypt or Yemen, for example, if they had been occupying and/orinterfering with our country for decades.

What if we had taken all the money we’ve used there for wars and instead, with their permission, invested in building up and helping the people there? Or what if we pulled out and left the Middle East to solve its own problems? You can bet they’d feel differently about us.

It’s called common sense, a commodity that unfortunately can’t be used to fuel factories or cars.

This Letter to the Editor is a shortened version of my Sept. 17 post Why Don’t They Like Us?

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