> 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.
>
There is another way of thinking realistically about these events and the response without falling into romantic moralism, which is the typical American reaction. It is to ask, explicitly or implicitly, "Don't we want to be safe in the future? Isn't it wise and prudent to know and understand the people and problem we confront?" It is at least as legitimate to question the emotive response that experiences the effort at causal understanding as somehow demeaning to the victims of crime.
I have spent a lot of my professional life as a social worker dealing with violence and victimization, particularly with child abuse. Also, I have supervised social work interns for many years, and teaching them that subtle skill called psychosocial assessment, which blends concepts that are psychological and sociological to make sense out of things people do. Yes, Nathan is right that sociological understanding will not let us predict exactly which person will respond in X way. On the other hand, it is clear that it helps us understand that if A, B, C, ......n circumstances do exist, then it becomes predictable that a certain number of people will behave in this or that positive or negative way.
On September 11, it didn't surprise me to watch those events on the tube. I hadn't know exactly what was going to happen, but it definitely had occurred to me that mass anger against the US was likely to result in something destructive happening, and that it was likely to hurt ordinary Americans who bore no specific responsibility for oppression in the third world. Since then I've found many people receptive to the argument that Bush's talk of "war" is not a practical response, not likely to make us safer, and very probably will not even result in capturing Osama bin Laden, assuming that they can prove him to have really been a culprit. The more or less technical evidence is readily available in the WALL STREET JOURNAL and TIME. It also is not hard to make the point that a loose network of terrorist cells depends for its security on a large pool of latent support that arises out of experiences people have had in many countries of the world.
This are all practical arguments that go straight to the concern for safety and security in the United States. It is possible to make them without seeming to condemn ordinary Americans. The common feeling of alienation from government means that it is easy to criticize Washington without in any way asserting that "you killed your dead loved ones by voting in this government."
I have been making this kind of argument for a long time, usually about issues of personal violence. In essence the conventional argument about "bad" or "evil" people involves defensive fantasies about the sources of badness or evil being apart from any experiences one can personally imagine, especially from inner experiences of the self. Religious people imagine the source of evil in explicitly supernatural terms. People who are not so traditionally religious tend still to respond to their anxiety with less formally magical thinking.
At the same time, most people are in a degree of conflict about these matters, and really are open to the argument that we can best satisfy the desire for safety, security, day-to-day well being by using our heads.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema