Blog: U.S. Foreign Policy

On April 17, Barack Obama made a speech, calling the Senate’s failure to pass mandatory background checks on gun owners shameful. They were six senators short of passing the bill. Although I agree with Obama’s emphasis on background checks, I don’t agree with his method of spreading his message. Alongside the president were the Sandy Hook victims’ families, who Obama tearfully embraced after the speech. Less than two weeks before this speech, 10 children were killed in a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan.

Although terrorists are killed in these attacks, a majority of the people killed and injured are civilians. This has created even more hostility to the United States and creates terrorists. Nothing justifies violence and the murder of innocent people. But if your home is destroyed by a drone, and you have lost everything, you will have resentment for the people that did this to you. And in some cases, it’s the U.S. government.

When Al-Qaeda attacked on 9/11, they were explicit with their motives, although many people still don’t understand the true motivation. It had nothing to do with us being a free and prosperous nation.

Our country was attacked because of our foreign policy in Muslim countries. If you read any Osama bin Laden interview, he said we had military bases on the Islamic holy land of Saudi Arabia, we were propping up corrupt dictators in the region, and bombing countries such as Iraq, killing hundreds if not thousands of people.

Dzohkhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber has come out and said he committed this act of terror because of the United States government’s foreign policy in the middle east. When will enough be enough, when a foreign policy that reflects our actual national security is implemented, when the government doesn’t try to eradicate terrorism through terrorism of our own? When logical politicians are elected? We may never see that day.

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