Awww, come on Starving Artist. Your previous posts were so cool and reasonable, and then you say something like this. 
The appropriate response to 9/11 wasn’t to find out “why terrorists hate US”, that’s besides the point. The right approach would have been police work, as the UK and Spain did after their terror attacks (Madrid and London, and the UK has had IRA problems for some time, too.) Not to attack a country that had nothing to do with Al Quaeda. Not to suspend basic human rights by passing restricted laws. When right-wing terrorist McVeigh blew up a building, causing (I think hundreds of) deaths, did the govt. forbid and haul in all right-wing groups? Did they declare “war on terror” (which is a method of warfare, not a country? It’s just as stupid as war on drugs, which was a dumb idea in the first place and didn’t work in the second place)? Did they change the laws to protect the Americans from the terrorists? No, there was police investigation, and eventually, the people responsible were caught and put in front of a normal trial. No torture, no tribunal necessary, either. (And before you say that was different - at the beginning of the investigation, there was no knowlegde how big the group behind it was. Only after the police work did it turn out to be a small group and not a network. But investigation would have worked for a large network, too.)
And while Bush cheated on the first election, it was the second time when a clear, obvious majority of the population voted for him despite starting the illegal, unneccassry, Iraq war, that made non-Americans loose all hope. That doesn’t mean we call his voters Neanderthals or anything. People over here are just baffled on why the Americans would do this.