Why do they hate us?

Remember right after 9/11, people were asking that question all the time? For our liberties, some said, and others said it's because "they" are crazy. But we kept asking that. It's natural. Someone attacks you, you think they hate you.

So why don't we understand why "terrorism" is on the increase in Yemen? We're attacking those people all the time, with drones mainly, killing them in tens (17 more on Thursday this week), and we generally don't even know who they are. The Washington Post reported this week that at least 15 attacks have taken place this year - more in 5 months than the past 10 years.

Of course they damn well hate us. It's like the Afghans: why do their soldiers keep turning on ours? Perhaps it's things like "a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike ... The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys," things that happen repeatedly and are dismissed (by us) as "accidents," "collateral damage," and "just a few civilians" in the Utterly Necessary Endless War To Keep Us Perfectly Safe - the war that is destroying our moral center.

The Post story ended by noting that

Panetta also defended the administration’s assertions that it has weakened AQAP, despite the al-Qaeda affiliate’s expansion in southern Yemen over the past year and its ability to continue to plot attacks against the United States.

But Panetta - not that he's alone - doesn't seem to correlate the increased attacks that have "weakend AQAP" with the "expansion" and "ability to continue to plot attacks". Or at least, if anyone is able to connect the dots, no one talks about that, no one in the American media anyhow.