Before any of us can start to treat the wounds left by 9-11 and beat those soulless "Islamic fascists" into democracy, maybe we need to think about why these things happen.

Sept. 11 wasn’t the call to arms for Americans to protect their God-given freedoms from everything un-American, but in the past 60 years or so, it’s the one we all seemed to agree on.

So for a minute, imagine this: you're an ordinary citizen. Imagine 9/11 as the lethal blow to that one world where global policies, terrorism, the dangers of petroleum dependency and religious fanaticism were really just ruses for desperate politicians and university professors taken off pension to save some face.

Suddenly, you and everyone you know are thrust into the murky world of global politics, and for the first time, our focus strays beyond our shores. Every day, it’s the United Nations, proliferation, sanctions, regime transparency, the Security Council, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda … This is everything these politicians and ratings-starved talk show hosts are arguing about.

And it’s Greek to most of us.

But the public, the government, everyone has got to do to whatever we need to do to save ourselves from another calamity. Not since the War of 1812 has the mainland been attacked. We nailed the problem, but the risk factors are all around us here and everywhere abroad.

You can beat one evil, but a greater one emerges, altering the course and shape of its once static dynamics into something fluid and constantly evolving. We need to be just as nimble and creative in our defense — the Geneva Convention be damned.

Missile defense shield? Far out! International law, global community? That's cute. Human rights? Who cares!

And for 9/11’s fifth anniversary, you can probably guess what all the programming across the mass media board is going to be about. Fox News and CNN will probably air specials titled “Why do they hate us?” and “Are we safer now?” Maybe Afghanistan will even get its annual blip on the media radar.

It’s not that these questions are bad questions. These questions haven't been beaten into irrelevancy because they're asked. But maybe they carry nothing but symbolic weight because we always get the same fear- and paranoia-inducing answers like they "hate us for what we have. They can't stand freedom."

What if those who carried out 9/11 are impassioned by grievances written in the blood of their kinsmen? A lot like how the bombing of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, international wiretapping, secret overseas prisons, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were and are still justified by our right to reprisal.

Maybe in recent years we did some pretty shady things in the international arena. Some questions to ask ourselves:

• Ever wonder why anyone would get pissed at us for propping up an authoritarian monarchy in Saudi Arabia hell-bent on suppressing political dissent?
• Are our ties with the Saudi monarchy so chummy because they sit above one-quarter of the world's proven petroleum reserves?
• People wouldn’t be mad because of crippling economic sanctions against Iraq in the early 1990s that resulted in the death of several hundred thousand Iraqis, could it?
• Wasn't the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan a clandestine chemical weapons facility and not a factory that provided thousands of Sudanese with medicine to fight off entirely treatable diseases?
• Those Afghan air strikes after 9/11, they didn't put seven million people at the brink of starvation, did they?
• No one at the Guantanamo Bay detention center ever violated human rights in their treatment of "enemy combatants," did they?

Rather quickly, this “freedom versus terror” thing gets pretty heady. As much as we want to believe revenge is exclusively our human right, see the above list.

The 9/11 attacks weren't a pre-emptive strike by cave-bound terrorists with cell phones and enough cash to buy several Middle Eastern countries. It was a coldblooded, murderous attack exacerbated by Islamic fanaticism and fomented by years of treacherous U.S. meddling in Middle Eastern affairs.

As Americans, what can we do about something like that? Lobby for tighter air and seaport security? Invade another country? More air strikes? Vote the pansy Democrats out of office?

Before any of us can start to treat the wounds left by 9/11 and beat those soulless "Islamic fascists" into democracy, maybe we need to think about why these things happen. While the U.S. government tries to divert our attention with a halo above its head, we really need to sneak the camera behind its back and focus on the blood staining its hands.

So as everyone proudly slaps the fifth “We will never forget” sticker on his or her back bumper and glues themselves to the latest Pentagon press conference warning of the newest threat, we still dodge the issue.

In reality, our greatest threat still remains a homegrown, state-sponsored, selective amnesia that dismisses weight of blame on those whose only job is to protect our shores and look to our future.

We don't look five years before 9/11 because we don't want to blame ourselves. We don't want to look five years from now because we won't know who to blame. But right now, five years after the fact, we're still in this no man's land of accountability.

The 9/11 commission pardoned the government. Five years, and no attacks yet, so it can't be the Bush administration. But when another attack happens, and if we're still asking "why do they hate us, how could this happen?" then it’s our own damn fault.

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