It's hard to argue that the negative effect Western countries have on the Middle East isn't far greater than whatever damage Islamic terrorists have been able to inflict on the West. You're arguing that intent mattes, and I'd agree, but not to the point where you can totally dismiss Western actions in the ME as "making mistakes".
While I'd agree that trying to draw a moral equivalence between intentionally targeting innocent people and harming them by accident is "overly simplistic", I'd also argue that your point is pretty naive as well. If you want to demonstrate that Western actions are "good", or at least easily dismissed, you need to do more than show that the terrorists are worse. In the world outside of junior high debate class, more than one side in a conflict can be in the wrong, especially because outside of that class, most conflicts have more than two sides.
The mechanic in Iraq who's house we accidentally blew up, and who's son we arrested and held without trial for several years because we thought he might be a bad guy, probably isn't going to be comforted by an argument that at least we don't intentionally target innocent people. He might agree that the terrorists are worse, but we're probably not going to win his heart or mind anytime soon...and the more first-hand negative experience he has with Americans, the less convincing third-person stories about terrorists are going to be.
Hamas enjoys popular support with Palestinians, while Israelis are vilified, for one basic reason. To a Palestinian, Hamas is the group that builds schools and provides medical care and food, while the Israelis are the people who blow up apartment buildings to get bad guys. An argument about Hamas being morally worse than the Israelis is convincing in the abstract, but in the real world, it's hard to sell that to the Palestinians.
The fact is that America has a horrendously low level of popularity in the Muslim world, and it can't be explained by branding EVERYONE there a terrorist. Our popular support isn't justification for terrorism, obviously, but the eventual solution to the conflict between the ME and the west will HAVE to come from improving relations between the two sides. And a big step forward there would be not setting the behavior of murders and terrorists as the moral baseline.
Motive is almost literally the entire point, to dismiss intent off hand is pretty funny and not really all that worthy of discussing. The weight that should be given to it is self-explanatory. Otherwise why does anyone, anywhere, get prosecuted for attempted manslaughter or murder, to waste time?
But from here, it's still pretty easy to see why virtually nothing can be done about a ME citizen that has no way of informing themselves about history when they don't live in areas with schools or a basic rule of law. What's hypocritical is that the same people against the U.S. occupying these ME countries will readily acknowledge their lack of schools and basic infrastructure, but would rather pull out and not nation build because it isn't worth it as if the two concepts can be reconciled. To say we can't afford it is one thing (which I would agree with is a good argument), but the problem with that is it's a recent argument that by itself isn't compelling (since it wouldn't actually bankrupt us, for one). Anti-war guys, and pacifists and what have you, don't use that line of reasoning enough anyway to matter.
What we know for a fact is that these ME children are literally told lies about what these wars are about, what the U.S.' intentions actually are. They are literally told that the U.S. is actively targeting women and children. We know that despite any pullout from the ME, the U.S. (and Israel) would continue to be blamed for past transgressions in either case or blamed for the transgressions of other countries we have no control over, but are connected with via strategic alliances and would therefore be lumped in with (Britain). What's naive is thinking, above all else, that things would be better if the U.S. suddenly pulled out of Afghanistan and Iraq, ignoring that the U.S. wasn't actually occupying the ME for at least 10 years prior to 9/11, unless you consider the presence of embassies a good reason to kill 3000 innocent civilians (and btw, U.S. embassies are bombed frequently yet their crimes are what, exactly?).
According to these terrorists it's because of past transgressions from previous decades, or it's because of isolated incidents around the world from recent times, that the U.S. should be attacked. People actually still argue that because we helped train the Afghans (mujaheddin) defeat the USSR in the 80's, that we are responsible for 9/11 because, uh, we trained them so they wouldn't be murdered in their homes? I mean that is literally the type of drivel you hear from people who just don't get it.
The whole idea of not occupying another country is sound in the sense that there is consider collateral damage that will inevitably occur and inevitably lead to disgruntled persons. And I agree with this wholeheartedly from the vantage point of not wanting to inflame a populace with little means of educating themselves. The problem with using that as the crux of your argument is that terrorists use
any excuse to attack a foreign country, because the crux of
their argument rests on the poor, uneducated ME citizen not realizing that his extremist Imam is advocating an immorally
equivalent retaliation against the U.S. (Britain, whoever) using the supposed "same" tactics and reasoning as the enemy. They use the
non-intervention of foreign countries as a reason to attack. This is all well documented, and it's why 9/11 was predictable despite the 90's being one of the least ME occupation-laden decades of the century. Nothing like the 80's in Afghanistan, and certainly nothing like anything previous to that. You still have terrorists referring to the U.K.-backed setup of the state of Israel 60+ years ago as a reason to attack both the U.K. and U.S. (because they were and still are allied with both).
Again, there's just no credibility to the argument that not occupying the ME would simply solve the problem or even significantly improve things. These guys don't actually
desire peace, that's why they kill innocent people to begin with. It's beyond naive to think that these terrorists wouldn't simply use our alliance with Israel or all our past combined transgressions for decades to come as justifications for attack on the U.S. and our allies. At which point you have to ask yourself; is it better to stay out of there completely and simply let innocent people die when you know you can stop it? Should we have just let millions of Africans die over the past decade instead of steaming the tide of that slaughter? Should we let the ME go without basic infrastructure or basic schools when both have proven successful in Iraq and Iran? Pulling out totally and completely from the ME does nothing to solve these problems. It merely delays the problem into the future. Not being proactive cost the U.S. dearly on 12/7/41, as delayed involvement in WWII merely gave Italy, Germany and Japan more time to collect themselves. It costs Jews in Germany and Poland even more dearly.
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