As usual, Victor Davis Hanson sums up how I feel:
The best way to sum up this now popular leftist analysis of the rage of Islamic fascists and their sometime supporters in the Middle East would be simply to imagine a different America, in, say, January 1941.
So envision a Vice President Henry Wallace lecturing the American people on its failure to win the hearts and minds of European youth. He perhaps would say something like, “What have we Americans done wrong to lose millions of Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and Japanese, who turn their back on democracy and prefer fascism?”
Roosevelt then might expound further, “Look at the world! We don’t have an ally anywhere but Britain. What have we done to earn the animus of most of Europe that has either joined Hitler or would prefer to be neutral? Why is all of Eastern Europe against us? Whether Communist or fascist, Russian or German, the common enemy is either the United States or England. All Stalin and Hitler can agree on is shared dislike of America. Why? Even Mexico and South America feel more affinity for Germany than for the U.S.”
Then a congressional board of inquiry could issue a finding that America had failed to give proper aid to Europe during the depression. It could suggest further that we are isolationists and self-absorbed. More thoughtful senators, the intellectual precursors of a Patty Murray perhaps, could rail that whereas Hitler built autobahns, we lent out high-interest loans to those who were already struggling.
All such browbeating would have an element of truth in it, but, of course, in its totality remain an outright lie: Hitler, like bin Laden and his epigones, was the problem, not us. The only difference is that our grandparents knew that and we don’t.