Yeah there's not one, but there are many Imams that are believed by many to have a leg-up on interpreting the Qur'an. There are many who argue that relying on Imams to interpret the words for you goes against the book itself, though.

This is a complicated question for many reasons. Firstly, many radical Imams endorsed the attacks, while many Imams condemned them. As far as looking at the reaction from a purely religious perspective, the vast majority of Muslims were sympathetic to us. This was distorted greatly by the media because those Muslims who were happy about the attacks are grouped together very tightly for the most part, so there was great news footage of large crowds of Muslims celebrating the attack.

Secondly, there were a lot of people in the Middle East who were happy about the attacks simply because they hate the U.S., and their being Muslim was completely unrelated to their feelings. As for why a lot of people in the Middle East hate us, that's a long discussion I don't have time for right this second, but a lot of their reasons are pretty solid.

This statement would never work if you replaced Muslim with Christian.

Secondly, there were a lot of people in the U.S. who were happy about the attacks simply because they hate the Middle East, and their being Christian was completely unrelated to their feelings.

Good, I'm glad they have pretty solid reasons to hate. Jesus tells everyone that there's no solid reason to hate and that It should be erased from the entire being. I would imagine He says this because hate is an evil presence in the life it encompasses.

Something's wrong here don't you think?

Of course it wouldn't, but that's not for any reason you may be thinking of. Besides the fact that the Middle East is a region made up of many countries, none of those countries have ever come to the US, overthrown a democratically elected government, and replaced it with exceedingly cruel dictators that were more receptive to their world-view. We, on the other hand, have been doing that in the middle east for 50+ years.

OK so take whatever word you would use to describe the people who committed the attacks of 9/11 (only multiply the scale by 100 or more and also assume they killed George W. Bush and replaced our government with an Islamic dictator) and use that word instead of hate, which was a word I used and not the people you are talking about.

That is a matter of ability though. Many of the rulers in those countries would do it, if they could. It's not that they don't want to do it, they just can't.

If we weren't in the middle east for the last "50+ years" than they would still be living in the middle ages. The only reason that region has even joined the technologically superior nations is because they have oil.

Ok, and how would we respond to that once we regained control of our country?

So we did them a favor? They still haven't joined the technologically superior nations, they have been exploited by some of them and now a lot of countries in the region hate those Western nations, which is perfectly logical. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here really, but it seems like you might be saying that the current situation is preferable to having left them in the middle ages, or bought the oil we needed from them without trying to build an empire.

You could also say that our presence caused the blowback that resulted in the recent rise in fundamentalism in the region. The rather rapid secularization in, say, Egpyt that was occuring 50 years ago resulted in grassroots organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood being able to quickly attain power in public life. The distaste for the Shah in Iran led to radical Islamism being presented as a reasonable alternative.

Wahhabism, for instance, was not around in its current form BEFORE the West began to intervene in the region. When you secularize a region, and then its response is to become arguably more fundamentalist than it ever recently was, it's hard to say that we helped them out of the dark ages.

I mean really for the people that aren't in the fraction of a % of the population that actually sees money from Oil sales in some of those countries, they are just functional serfs of the West. I know this is not an entirely accurate description but it seems reasonable to me that they would conclude this from their POV.

And yeah auto, I don't think you will find many objective people that have done much research on the issue who will say we did more good than harm or even close in that region. Not that we typically do much better in any other region =/

Since WWII, our biggest foreign intervention success story has been Vietnam. Only because they kicked us the **** out on their terms, so we just decided to be diplomatic about normalizing relations. Now we have diplomatic and trade relations without wasting billions on nation-building and long term occupation.