What's really frightening is to see people like Mr. Livingston blindly divide the world into two camps — the good and the evil — and demand that the good do all in its power to end the evil. This view is shortsighted and mistaken, and as hard as it is to do, Americans have to accept the fact that their own foreign policy is implicated in the attacks.

The history is clear and overwhelming: United States foreign policy has supported, trained, funded and turned a blind eye to numerous dictators and despots whose rule was considered of strategic importance to United States interests, regardless of the wave of human rights and international law violations they so rampantly committed. These policies allowed more than 200,000 innocent civilians to die in Guatemala, more than 500,000 in East Timor, more than 4,000 in Chile and so on. This does not justify terrorist responses on innocent lives anywhere in the world, yet it does provide an interesting insight into why resentment towards America is so widespread.

As a simple analogy: If you have a child and, over the course of 18 years, subject it to merciless taunting and abuse, you should not be surprised when it lashes out in violent and irrational ways. When this happens, you cannot simply claim the child is "evil" and try to excuse his or her lashing out.

Simple legal and social doctrines ask that we consider not only what things happened, but why they happened. Only then will we be able to fundamentally address those root causes and work in the spirit of true prevention, not simply deterrence.