US-supported Middle East rulers breed the terror directed against America

Evidence

But why should we feel threatened by such a change? The overwhelming evidence is that the majority of our terrorist enemies come from purportedly friendly countries, and their main grievance against us is that, in their eyes, we are responsible for maintaining the tyrannical regimes that rule over them—an accusation that has, to say the very least, some plausibility. Apart from Turkey and Israel, the two countries in the region where the governments are elected and can be dismissed by the people, most of the countries of the Middle East can be divided into two groups: those with what we are pleased to call friendly governments, and therefore increasingly hostile people who hold us responsible for the oppression and depredations of those governments, and, on the other hand, those with bitterly hostile governments, whose people consequently look to us for help and liberation. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1797

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the Said-adjacent mechanism claim that Western support for autocrats is legible to regional populations and converts diplomatic friendliness into popular hostility; connects to the reader’s cluster on how the region became legible. — connects to: US imperial operations generate the very blowback they then label terrorism
• DEFINE: Inverts the standard friend/enemy mapping: friendly governments produce hostile peoples, hostile governments produce people looking to Washington for liberation.