Victor Davis Hanson writes it much better than I ever could.
Why did radical Islamic terrorists kill almost 3,000 Americans a decade ago?
Few still believe the old myth that U.S. foreign policy or support for Israel logically earned us Osama bin Laden’s wrath. After all, the U.S. throughout the 1990s had saved Islamic peoples from Bosnia and Kosovo to Somalia and Kuwait. Russia and China, in contrast, had oppressed or killed tens of thousands of their own Muslims without much fear of provoking al-Qaeda.
Moreover, thousands of Arabs have been killed recently, but by their own Libyan and Syrian governments, not Israeli Defense Forces. Al-Qaeda still issues death threats to Americans even though its original pretexts for going to war — such as U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia — have long been irrelevant.
On this ten-year anniversary of 9/11, no one has yet refuted the general truth that bin Laden tried to hijack popular Arab discontent over endemic poverty and self-induced misery. In cynical Hitlerian fashion, al-Qaeda’s propagandists sought to blame the mess of the Arab Middle East on Jews and foreigners, rather than seeking to address homegrown corrupt kleptocracies, inefficient statism, indigenous tribalism, gender apartheid, and religious fundamentalism and intolerance.
Past Western appeasement of terrorism only convinced the manipulative bin Laden that he might kill Westerners without much fear of retaliation, as he presented himself to the Islamic street as the new Saladin who had humbled the Western infidel.
As much as our efforts, OBL and AQ’s willingness to slaughter other Arabs and Muslims led to their demise. Nothing erodes support among the Arab masses than blowing up wedding parties because the participants were “Muslim enough”.