By Dennis Rahkonen

Following the Spanish-American War, US troops killed perhaps as many as 600,000 Filipinos who didn't want to simply see a change in imperial masters. Mark Twain famously condemned that terrible slaughter, among whose victims were countless Moro Muslims.

In 1953, our CIA masterminded the overthrow of Iranian secular leader Mohammad Mossadegh, which gave rise to religious/revolutionary impulses culminating in the US embassy seizure in Tehran, plus everything that's happened there since.

In 1958 and again in the early '80s, the US unwisely intervened in Lebanon, incurring Islamic wrath triggering the horrible Marine barracks bombing in Beirut.

In 1965, the CIA provided right-wing Indonesian death squads with names of real or imagined enemies, and half a million citizens of the world's most populous Muslim country were brutally murdered.

In 1993, we blundered into Mogadishu, Somalia, to experience a debacle re-created in the film, Black Hawk Down, which serves as a cautionary lesson for the present day.

In Saudi Arabia, the holy land of Islam, Christian Americans (viewed as infidels) had the thoughtless audacity to establish military bases, which Osama bin Laden later cited as his primary reason for launching jihadist revenge.

Throughout its modern existence, our government has pivotally assisted, and funded, Israel's repressive, violent thwarting of necessary Palestinian independence.

Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which continue to blow apart far more innocents than actual terrorists, have unleashed a torrent of impassioned recruits for the Islamic insurgent cause.

We're now repeating the same folly in Pakistan, a locale with frightening powder keg potential.

Despite this clear record of hugely counterproductive interventionism, some in Washington are talking about going to war in Yemen, where approximately 200 "al Qaeda types" exist within a total population of roughly 23 million. Covert efforts are already underway.

Well before 9/ll, a few perspicacious observers predicted that decades of "Ugly American" world-cop bullying -- so abrasively insensitive to sacred foreign values -- would one day trigger an enraged act of dramatic payback.

That's why some of us didn't react to airliners crashing into twin towers and the Pentagon with astonished shock. We merely shook our heads, and wondered why it had taken so long.

No, all those innocents didn't deserve to die. Nobody should ever follow the reprehensible Hiroshima model of annihilating civilian multitudes for supposedly just reasons.

But our Yankee Cowboy mentality, which compelled us to lasso African and Asian sovereigns into Wall Street-benefiting, one-way relationships of economic dependency and de facto cultural rape, plainly indicated that someone would get very angry with us as an eventual result.

We can guarantee homeland security only by becoming a genuine friend and benefactor to humanity. Our dirty wars must be ended, our unmanned killer drones grounded, and our global exploitation of others ceased.

Most importantly, let's scrap the abysmal piety that makes us think we're so much better, or more guiltless, than others.

Millions of accusatory ghosts -- from mass-murdered "Indians" to napalmed Vietnamese -- can attest that we've slaughtered infinitely more noncombatant men, women, and children during our crimson history than today's non-state terrorists have even remotely, jointly claimed.

WikiLeaks disclosures of our current foreign policy obscenities prove that the killing continues.

Meanwhile, here at home, anti-Islamic intolerance is running rampant, most notoriously manifested in baseless hysteria relative to the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in Lower Manhattan.

Small wonder we're "unpopular" with Muslims.

Nothing infuriates a sooty kettle as much as being told by a thoroughly blackened pot that it lacks sufficient shine.

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(Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the '60s)