"Max and others on the left are supporting the bombing for good reasons-- they know the American people want justice for their loss and the Left is not promising it in any real form. He doesn't buy my version either, but that just means we need to strengthen it until Max and a range of other progressives see a viable way to achieve that justice without bombing innocent Afgani civilians."
No they are not. They are supporting the bombing on a gamble with unknown odds, which, by Max's own reckoning will cause more deaths to Afghanis than to Americans, including the WTC atrocity. Without this gamble there is no way of maintaining that it fullfill what the American people allegedly crave - justice and assurance that this won't happen again/ Max thinks that the bombing will work if there are no more attacks on the scale of that disaster. But not only is that sentiment lacking in a statistical framework for verification, since the frequence of WTC-scale attacks is so tiny, it is also in practice an unfalsifiable proposition, because any future attack can be attributed to "not enough bombing". Lucky we've been discussing Kuhn...
Max and others seem to me to be a little reckless. In my opinion, bombing innocent Afghani civilians is a reductio ad absurdum of any policy against terror, as well as being simply stupid, as it will surely create more resentment and more recruits to the terrorist cause. It provides ex post facto justification for Osama bin Laden's claims about the United States; people will surely listen to the other part of his message, the fanatical fundamentalist part, the more this part is proven. Little wonder, as this was in all likelihood the calculation behind the attacks on September 11. Maybe you'll say "oh, but any military action will kill civilians" - well, yes, I am sure bin Laden was perfectly aware of this, and banking on it.
This is all made worse by the fact we refuse to negotiate bin Laden's extradition with the Taliban, who offered to turn him over. If that was a bluff, we should have called it - we do want to prosecute him, right? (or maybe there is a fear that if we took him to a fair court, the case would not be strong enough... who knows?)
There was all along the current fiasco a possibility of forming a coalition not with loony leftists, who are irrelevant, but with the less insane rightwingers - who might be persuaded that bombing Afghanistan was to answer bin Laden's prayers. If Max and others need human sacrifices, or can tolerate them in name of "justice", then too bad for them. I think we'd get a better hearing from the "security" folks, the more perceptive of whom know this current war will worsen our situation.
Justice? What justice is there in unknown and possibly negative punishment for the guilty (ie. martirdom), who are in turn not proven to be actually guilty and resulting in unknown and possibly negative "deterence" - all pursued by certain and terrible means?
The terrible fact, which paralises the left is that in our world, there can be no justice for a September 11, much as there can be no justice for the Holocaust or for the millions of dead in America's shadow. The best we can do is erect a monument in their memory, perhaps one that speaks "never again." Better yet, we can try to create a world where there is a possibility of justice. I can think of no better such effort than trying to solve this matter peacefully, by pusuing those means Max and others consider to be unpredictable, but which are no more unpredictable than war, namely, to try coopting the Taliban, undermining Al-Qaeda's support with concessions and so on and so forth, ultimately dealing with the accused in a fair and legal way. Max and Kelly may think that this is likely to show terrorists that they can win concessions. Or it might show them that America can act rationally. Who knows? We don't - but we do know that this war is stirring up massive support for the terrorists anyway, so _we_ have nothing to loose except the oportunity to conquer Afghanistan. Not to mention it does nothing to build an alternative to terror - either for us or for moslem radicals. We are erecting a huge monument of skulls which fulfills every one of the terrorist sympathiser's fears and which does nothing to honor the dead. The present war is certainly not saying "never again" - how could it, following as it does the terrorist's own logic?
The point Nathan makes is a bit like standing next to one of Pol Pot's skull pyramids and saying "Jeez, but if only we had a better idea of an alternative, maybe we could convince some of the people who support building these things that it may not be so nice after all." Maybe you think this is hyperbole - but according to the UN estimates, millions of people are directly threatened with starvation by our current actions. How tall does the pyramid have to be before we start noticing it was wrong at any size?
Of course this is not going to win converts to my cause, and I apologise if I seem abrasive. I have no alternative course of action for justice for bin Laden. As far as I am concerned, the whatever possibility of justice afforded by our international institutions evaporated with the first American bomb. I see the job of the left being to point at the growing pile of corpses and say "not this way." Then, the other job is to talk about how it might be done otherwise. But the problem here is that anything is better than killing millions of defenseless people - and biting the bullet that there can be no justice in the current world is hardly the worst alternative.
Thiago Oppermann