>Again: to ignore the fact that there is a great chasm between saying that
>the attacks had a "cause" -- which most things in the world do -- versus
>saying they were "justified" is a dreadful bit of obscurantism. Most
>sensible left commenators I have seen are writing sensibly towards the
>"cause" side. Why are you ignoring them?
But the issue is not merely justification but the accusation implicit in the left's causal arguments that the Sept 11 attacks were foreseeable and thus the US goverment has responsibility for those results and thus voters, including those who died, are responsible for their own deaths.
It is quite coherent to argue that the Sept 11 attacks were unjustified, yet foreseeable, and therefore the US government bears responsibility for those results. That is precisely the explicit line of a number of sectarian groups and the implicit line of many other leftists.
On the purely political level, you may think it is a good idea for the left to say to the families of the dead that, yes, bin Laden is an evil guy, but heck, we knew that, so really we caused this result since the results of our actions were foreseeable, so you killed your dead loved ones by voting in this government. People are not fools. If you argue that this result was a foreseeable result of US policy, that is the message they hear, and they are not deaf in doing so.
Even if I believed there was such a causal explanation of these events, I'd think that the Left was suicidal for engaging in such self-destructive rhetoric, at least so immediately after the event when there are plenty of alternative arguments for more likely to prevent war rather than stir resentment against the antiwar movement.
But I don't buy the causal explanation. As many leftists themselves have noted, this Sept 11 attack was irrational in serving almost any goal of counteracting US foreign policy and therefore was not a foreseeable result of that policy in any credible way.
I return to my statement of proportion. Every legal code and moral code ("eye for an eye" etc.) recognizes such proportion precisely because of this sense of foreseeability. The reason such proportionate response is recognized is that people can control their actions, recognizing such a likely response will entail if they deviate from expected norms or laws. But if the response is disproportionate, such a response is not foreseeable, not in any rational way "caused" by the initial action, so any sense of moral balance in deterence is established
Tried sociology, let's move to law for a second. The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution follows this idea in banning "cruel and UNUSUAL punishment." In practice that may get violated, but people continually note that where unexpected, unusual, punishments are used, policy fails and the results are immoral imprisonments.
In tort cases, causation is a basic issue to be proved. Once upon a time, any intervening action erased causal responsibility from the original actor. Over time, this standard was relaxed to include foreseeability in causal views. Thus, if a consumer misuses a product in a foreseeable way, the manufacturer will still often be held responsible for harm to that consumer. But if another actor acts in an unforeseeable way, then just because one actor set a series of actions in motion, was what is called the "but for" action (nothing would have resulted without their initial action), they are still not treated as causing the result. Thus, if I tailgate a person too closely and they have to lurch to a stop and we crash together, I am held responsible. However, if I tailgate someone, they become enraged, pull out a gun, and shoot my passenger, I am not treated as causing that death. If shoot a man's wife, he becomes enraged in an irrational way, and kills other innocent people, I am not treated as having caused the deaths of those other people either, since such a result is not in any sense foreseeable.
At some level, all of these discussions are semantic, but rather crucial semantics for the moral sense of what is happening in such catastrophic events. I am quite comfortable having the left talking about solutions that address real grievances in the world and alleviate misery in the world through global justice to decrease both the amount and support for irrational violence. But I see it as fruitless, politically suicidal and moral repugnant to spend much time analyzing the "causal" links in this particular act of violence.
Shit happens. Theres a lot of wisdom in that. Given a complicated world, we will get farther spending less time attributing precise liability for where the shit came from and more talking about how to get rid of the shit in the future.
My sense is that a lot of people recognize that the US government does bad things, but they also believe other people do bad things, so sorting out the blame is complicated. And they hear too much from the left describing the US's blame for those problems and not enough about alternative solutions. So in a world of lots of bad people doing bad things, but where the militarized Right has "yes" solutions to dealing with the bad things and the Left runs overwhelmingly non-solution campaigns "NO ___", people go with the military solutions as SOMETHING.
You might think that if we prove that the US government had funded and promoted Bin Laden, people will see the obvious solution of not doing such things in the future. But an obvious alternative solution is to make sure we kill our tools when we are done with them. Just as rational. And has the advantage at the moment of being a solution to the problems we face NOW.
As I've said, I find the causal explanations of Sept 11 pretty unpersuasive. I would prefer to concentrate on causal arguments of what we can do now to increase justice and prevent the FORESEEABLE events that may occur in the future. And convince the public that, for the unforeseeable events, sacrificing civil liberties won't help much on that score.
That's my agenda as an activist.
Nathan Newman