Again the LA Times shocks me with a completely uncharacteristic Op Ed. 

And the author, Dinesh D’Souza, goes a step further suggesting the Democratic Congress is leading us down the same path.

The Clinton and Carter administrations made the U.S. look like a weak, attractive target for terrorists.

In considering a funding cutoff for U.S. troops in Iraq, the liberal leadership in Congress runs the risk of making the United States more vulnerable to future attacks, not just in the Middle East but here at home. To understand this, it’s not enough to revisit the factors that led to the Iraq invasion. We must consider the roots of 9/11 itself. Only by understanding the policies that sowed the seeds of 9/11 can we intelligently decide how best to proceed in fighting the war on terror.

Pundits on the left say that 9/11 was the result of a "blowback" of resistance from the Islamic world against U.S. foreign policy. At first glance, this seems to make no sense. American colonialism in the Middle East? The U.S. has no history of colonialism there. Washington’s support for unelected dictatorial regimes in the region? The Muslims can’t be outraged about this, because there are no other kinds of regimes in the region. U.S. support for Israel and wars against the Muslims? Yes, but the U.S. has frequently fought on the side of the Muslims, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s or in the Persian Gulf War.

But in a sense the liberal pundits are right. The U.S. made two gigantic foreign policy blunders in recent decades that did sow the seeds of 9/11. What the liberals haven’t recognized is that these blunders were the direct result of their policies and actions, and were carried out by Democratic presidents — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

To understand this, we need a little perspective. Radical Islam became a global force in 1979, when it captured its first major state, Iran. Before that, radical organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood were fighting losing battles to overthrow their local governments. This changed with the success of the Khomeini regime in Iran. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the first Muslim leader to describe the U.S. as the "Great Satan" and to counsel martyrdom and jihad against it. Iran continues to be a model for radical Muslims.