Bush's Fault

This headline in the Washington Post infuriates me: "U.S. Wars Motivated Boston Suspects."

Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan, where President Obama plans to end combat operations by the end of 2014.

Obama has made repairing U.S. relations with the Islamic world a foreign policy priority, even as he has expanded drone operations in Pakistan and other countries, which has inflamed Muslim public opinion.

I can think of about a hundred motivations worse than a war that hardly affected these two murderous young men.  How about a radical "religious" ideology that has propelled them to instill hatred to those surrounding them, both physically and emotionally? What about the extremists who listed step-by-step careful instructions on the internet on how to create a pressure-cooker bomb that would explode and maim and kill hundreds of innocent bystanders? How about their parents and spouse who looked the other way as their sons became indoctrinated? How about liberals who look the other way in espousing diversity-oriented ideologies over loyalties toward America? How about homicide detectives who apparently never connected suspect B with the murder of three people he knew.

There are a lot of people you can blame as motivators. Ultimately, the only ones responsible are those two individuals who set off the bombs and the mayhem, unless others are fingered (and I am not discounting that possibility.) But media, stop pressing this narrative that it was these wars that propelled the hate. The Taliban provoked the war in Afghanistan. And in Iraq, Saddam was a murderous thug and the world is better off without him in it.