Those who oppose the paranoia that infuses the posts on this list don't spend their time excoriating the U.S. and colonialism. It should be obvious that understanding of the modern bloody history of corporate capitalism is implicit in our thinking. But that is now secondary to the horror of the World Trade Center and the danger that the Taliban, Bin Laden, and their supporters, wallowing in oil riches,  hold for the world. 
As to colonialism: after all, every country of the world was "colonized" at one time or another. Some countries (like Pakistan and Jordan) were created by the great powers are buffers against perceived enemies. Israel was created out of the cauldron of the Holocaust and recognized by the U.S. in a sincere gesture of understanding that if there were no such nation, the Jewish remnant would have no place to go. Perhaps it was out of guilt for the sorry performance of the U.S during World War II and the strong strain of anti-semitism that characterized attitudes  in the highest offices of the nation as late as the presidency of Richard Nixon. The Jews chose a lousy location, without water or oil and surrounded by hundred of millions of people who oppose them; but there was no other on which the Jews had a legitimate claim.  And they do have such a claim, as there is no statute of limitations on the Law of Return. The present war-like steps taken by the Israeli government is regrettable and should be reversed, but they pale in seriousness in thew lost shadom of the WTC.
I ask you to stop for a moment bleeding on behalf of soldiers who count you as their enemy and would as soon put you in your grave -- stop and  put yourself on the ground in NY on 9/11/01. See your innocent friends, coworkers of all ethnic groups and social classes, many among them people who opposed war, who supported Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and UNESCO, massively pulverized and incinerated for the glory of Allah. What will you say if the West loses, Israel is destroyed, and your country falls to the Taliban? Will your Western ways be permitted to survive? Will your wives, sisters and daughters be permitted to go to school and university, to work, to enter government,   to be bare-armed and bareheaded, to bask in the sun in the presence of strangers (men), to have premarital sex or commit adultery or be homosexual,  to be equal before the law, to eat pork, to drive cars, to choose their own religion or non-religion as they see fit? Will your museums and libraries be destroyed as the Buddhas were and the fanatics wish to do to the Pyramids?
Put yourself in the place of the naive Christian missionaries being tried by the Taliban Supreme Court, by men who have never read Western or Asian philosophy, never watched "I Love Lucy" on television, never seen a play by Pinter, Ibsen, or Chekhov,  never seen a Bergman motion picture or a painting by Picasso,  never heard the music of Mozart or of Louis Armstrong, never read Shakespeare or Dickens or Rushdie, know nothing of other faiths than their own, men who believe that all who do not espouse their version of Islam are infidels -- so it says in the Qur'an -- and to proselytize a Muslim to Christianity is punishable by death. It's not anthrax that worries me, it is the loss of freedom, equality, even mere existence as a human being that I  see in the eyes of the fanatics.
It is simply monstrous to imply, as one post did, that the WTC catastrophe may have been engineered by the Bush administration. They're bad, but they are not so evil as is the unenlightened mindset of a Bin Laden, under whom our exchange could never happen, as our ideas would not exist. We would be reduced to the state of barbarians, or we would die.