There's been an interesting discussion regarding the War on Terror. Simply put, the discussion revolves around what the causes of 9/11 were, did the US "deserve" to be attacked and does the US really need to understand the "root causes" in order to win.
Opinions vary on this, of course. But I will submit that historically speaking, WHY rarely, if ever matters. Nation states don't ask why something happened to them. They react instead to what actually happened. We may not like this. We may wish that populations were more introspective. But you can either deal with the world as it is or sit around being frustrated that the world isn't the way you wish it was.
People who are effective in life, in my experience, are the ones who deal with the world as it is. Those who fail are usually impotently trying to change the world to behave as they would like it to be.
What makes matters worse, those who wish the world was something it's not tend to fall under self-delusion. For instance, I have found that those who wish the world was different tend to be quite hostile to the United States. I won't get into whether that hostility is justified or not because that part doesn't matter. But the other half of the self-delusion is more serious -- they tend to ascribe motives and traits to those who oppose the United States that simply aren't true.
For example: Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda isn't some noble organization fighting with any means necessary to preserve their native culture. They're just yet another hateful bigoted group of violent thugs that history has seen thousands of times who differentiate themselves only in the scale of their violence. The difference between Al Qaeda and say the KKK is only a matter of scope, not personality.
Al Qaeda and their ilk are violent racist organizations that despise our culture for what it stands for and wishes to eradicate it from the face of the earth through violence -- first in the middle east and later throughout the world. It has very little to do with the imagined wrongs the US has committed during some arbitrary time frame.
The US doesn't need to "understand" Al Qaeda any more than the US needed to understand Japan's motivations for attacking Pearl Harbor. It is up to the one who is liable to suffer the most to learn from history.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) are the end points that trace their beginnings to Pearl Harbor. One can argue that the deaths of over a million Japanese civilians (when you add in conventional bombing) was an overreaction to the loss of 2,500 people (mostly sailors) in a military base attack. But ultimately, that's not something Americans have to worry about. Maybe they should in some ideal world give these matters the weighty concern they deserve. But they don't.
In reality, it is the one doing the attacking that should be reading up on history. The reaction to 9/11 is significant and far-reaching and should be an object lesson to those would would perpetuate terrorism against the United States. For after all, there have been zero terrorist attacks against the US since 9/11 while on the other hand Al Qaeda's leaders are living in caves in the mountains of Pakistan, Saddam is gone, and the Taliban is now without a country to rule.
From the US's point of view, therefore, there is little evidence to show why the US needs to "understand" the question "why do they hate you". Again: Yes, maybe Americans SHOULD care. Maybe they SHOULD come together and take a "hard look" at the foreign policies that help give rise to the Bin Laden's of the world. But it's not going to happen. It's not because Americans are uniquely oblique to this, it's just human nature. And even if they wanted to, the chattering classes who are so ready to educate America as to "why they hate you" can't even agree what the justification is. I don't think the Average New Yorker is going to see the connection between alleged US interference in say Chile or the Bay of Pigs or whatever and airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center.
I know I don't care why. I might care academically but I would rather see those who would perpetuate such violence and hatred removed first so that I have the luxury of pondering those issues in relative peace and security.
In short, knowing why might be interesting in an academic sense but on a practical level, it doesn't matter. It never matters. Anyone who knows anything of history, will recognize that the why someone attacks you never matters. It only matters that they did. Nation states aren't individuals. They are collectives. They react as collectives. They cannot do otherwise and never do. And idealists are far from the first to express their frustration and exasperation over the way "the masses" react.
It is far more effective for the middle east to clean up its culture of death and violence than try to convince Americans that it somehow "had it coming" because the US supported Israel or because it had a US base in Saudi Arabia or some other lame ass argument for justifying the mass murder of innocent people.
Let us remember, after all, that 9/11 was PLANNED during the Clinton administration who was about as benevolent to the Muslim world as can be realistically expected. If Clinton's foreign policy wasn't "sensitive" enough to the middle east, then I can't envision any US policy that would satisfy the violent hate mongers and their death cults. Clinton was their best case scenario.
But all that aside, I can find far more justification as to why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor than to muddle through the bullshit arguments as for why 9/11 occurred. Pearl Harbor was attacked in response to specific US actions with specific goals in mind. By contrast, 9/11 happened for very nebulous reasons with very nebulous (and unrealistic) goals. When you read through a history book on World War II, there's no debate as to what was the impetus for Pearl Harbor. But even 3 years later, we still debate the WHY of 9/11. I saw on one forum someone claiming the US policy on the Kyoto treaty was a "contributing" factor. Simply put, the reasons for 9/11 are at best, nebulous.
And at the end of the day, Al Qaeda is no government in waiting. It's just another pathetic violent hate group more akin to a KKK out of control than any sort of legitimate organization.