Brett Stephens at the Wall Street Journal chides those who excuse terrorist violence from the Islamic world.

There’s a great deal of literature about how young Muslim men—often born in the West to middle-class and not particularly religious households—get turned on to jihad….  It’s a long list.

And in many cases investigators are able to identify an agent of radicalization…. But the influence of the Awlakis of the world can’t fully account for the mind-set of these jihadists. They are also sons of the West—educated in the schools of multiculturalism, reared on the works of Noam Chomsky and perhaps Frantz Fanon, consumers of a news diet heavy with reports of perfidy by American or British or Israeli soldiers. If Islamism is their ideological drug of choice, the political orthodoxies of the modern left are their gateway to it.

Stephens mentions a famous anti-colonial thinker, Chomsky, as a purveyor of the idea that hatred of the West is justified in the Islamic world.  This attitude is not limited to scholars.  It is peddled by public relations firms that are paid by Islamic governments to sell these stories to Western publics.  Burson-Marsteller, called “the PR firm of evil” even by MSNBC, has just crafted a poll designed to push that very point.  Using simplistic language and offering no useful analysis, the poll finds that 90% of Iraqi youth view the United States as an enemy government.

It does not ask why.  It might be because the United States, having brought peace to their land after a brutal civil war, abandoned them to a new spiral of darkness.  President Obama has recently tried to shift the blame for his disastrous Iraq policy onto the shoulders of retiring Central Command leader General Lloyd Austin.  But Austin advised President Obama not to withdraw precipitously from Iraq.  President Obama abandoned Iraq to a renewed chaos.  Had American soldiers remained in the country to stabilize the government, the peace that flourished following the Surge and into 2009 would have continued.

Instead, though, we are told that our ‘occupation’ was the driver of their rage.  “For years, many have argued that Muslims and Arabs, like other humans, don’t appreciate being bombed or occupied,” says Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. “Finally, we have a study to confirm this suspicion.”

That is nonsense.  The Gulf States love America, including Bahrain where we base the US 5th Fleet and Qatar where Central Command’s forward deployed headquarters is located.  Kuwaitis love America in spite of the fact that we base Air Force operations there serving the war in Afghanistan and, yes, Iraq.  Iraqis had mixed feelings about the troops who both were a reminder of national weakness and yet also a guarantor of their country’s stability.  Many did not want us to leave.  “Occupation” isn’t driving the anger at America among the current state of Iraq.

What is driving the anger is the way in which our leadership broke the promises we made, and allowed peace to slip away.  President Obama broke our word and left them to be savaged by the dogs of war.  But peddling the justification has its purpose.  It allows the President to shift the blame for Iraqi anger to his predecessor.  It also teaches the potential jihadist, however, that the West condemns itself and thinks their anger against us is justified.  It suggests to them that we are prepared to submit, because we do not see ourselves as morally worthy to wield the sword.  Weakness provokes.  As a man who knew something about jihad once said, everyone always favors the strong horse.