Since when were the families of the dead the arbiters of what's a proper response? Only the most backward legal systems let the victims determine the punishment.
>
>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.
That's a bit of a non-sequiteur. Lots of actions provoke responses that are themselves futile.
But the 'reaction' theory is mistaken. It would be more accurate to say that the perpetrators of the WTC/Pentagon attacks were inspired by US militarism. That is, like the militarists, they consider their own conscience sufficient cause to kill.
>
>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.
I don't get it. Who are you going to punish? The perpetrators are dead. You can't mix up justice and warfare. If this is a defensive attack against an enemy that's one thing. If it is justice for the victims then you can only punish those that are proven guilty.
>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.
But it is because the US (and other western governments) have a propensity for doing bad things that it is foolish to expect them to do good. Why would you get a pitbull terrier to look after your kids? Why would you expect the American or British government to improve the lot of ordinary people in Afghanistan. That's not prejudice, it's empirical fact.
>
>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.
I think this is chilling, not to say megalomaniacal. People aren't tools. I find it disturbing that Nathan says 'we' so readily. Does he assume responsibility for what US imperialism does? I just don't trust the US government to do the right thing, and think it should be opposed. It strikes me as a failure of imagination to see the only viable action as state action.
>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.
Here's a forseeable event: US and British intervention in Afghanistan will cause more innocent deaths, accelerate tribal conflicts, impoverish people, and enhance social and political reaction there. To do something about that, stop the intervention.
-- James Heartfield