As a sociologist I would first ask "at what point in time" and "by whom"? It is one thing to consider actions before taking them, and quite a different thing to re-construct them ex post facto. And a totally different thing to attribut these motives to other people's actions, based on necessarily selective perceptions of other people's deeds and characteristics. Believe me, there is a boatload of sociological lit on that. My recommended reading, of the top of my mind, is _Seductions of Crime_ by Jack Katz which might be of some interest to a legal professional, as it deals with the motivation behind crime.
I understand that lawyers routinely attribute motives to other people's actions - which is the key element of a court trial, but they do it on ample factual evidence (I hope) rather than journalistic accounts of waht happened. I was surprised that a keen and perceptive thinker, such as yourself, fell for that tripe. I guess the last week's events had really bad effect on all of us.
>to be Tolstoy to surmise that whoever did this thought that God was his
>side. Bill's actions were different: theyw ere not self-sacrificing or
>ideological, and it's pretty transparent that he knews they were wrong,
>e.g., when he attacked Iraq to distract the public from his impeachment.
To be honest, neither of us really knows what motivated Clinton to make that decision, but we can speculate as we wish. My own speculation is that the "wag the dog" motive - while most likely present - played a rather minimal role, determining the "when" rather than the "whether."
I can furtehr speculate the motives of the terrorists who destroyed the WTC. Methinks, it was pure religiously inspired hatred that drove them to destruction of the hated target at any cost, and blinded them to consider any consequences of that act - even their own death (young folks often feel they are indestructible, although that clearly defies reason). I am talking from introspection here: in the past, I experienced several instances of rage that led me to behavior which obiously could have been very harmful to me. Luckily I quickly came to reason, and even more luckily I avoided harm. I can easily see, however, that maintaining such rage - for example through religious motivations and ecstasy that are quite common in islam (cf. dancing dervishes) - can produce long-term engagement in harmful behavior without perceiving it as harmful.
In short, methinks these individuals acted out of pure, artificially stimulated hatred that made them oblivious to any harm, including their own destruction. Or perhaps they though they would "live" and be rewarded in heaven. Thus, the 'sacrifice" element stipulated in your argument is absent from their motives. They are like rabid animals that must be destroyed before they harm others.
Now, let us pick our own intellectual poison to numb our minds.
wojtek