I hope that it is ok to send this to you, seeing the list is very busy - I am a long time observer of this list, which is excellent. I only write because I was thinking hard about this stuff the other day, and see that the argument is raging over there as well. I hope it doesn't add to much the confusion]
Re: Nathan's argument.
First I should say that I agree with Nathan's position (if this is his position) that it is hard to see much difference between knowingly creating conditions for x and being culpable for x. But I think the "knowingly" and active participation in "creating" are the important bits.
If you wanted to be really strict about it, you could argue like this:
1. To the extent that the US Government's foreign policy created the conditions whereby terrorism flourishes, it is partially, and only partially, responsible for placing its own citizens in danger. (You can imagine all sorts of factors which would increase or decrease the degree of responsibility here - for instance, if the actions pursued actually had predictable outcomes)
2. To the extent that the people in the US voted for the US Government with the explicit intention of maintaining the foreign policy (1), they are culpable, again partially and now twice removed, from creating conditions where terrorism flourishes, and for placing themselves in the line of fire.
3. Those people killed in the WTC and Pentagon who fullfill (2) are partially responsible for their own deaths.
I haven't actually heard anyone argue this seriously the whole way through in the media or even in activist circles around here(but I am here in Australia, and the media blitz is only partial).
Many people argue 1. It does not ammount to a blame-the-victim argument at all, since it does not involve a concession of (2) and only someone with serious wool in between their ears would think that the terror attacks were attacks only on the US government, who is taking the blame according to (1). But to the extent that the US government was a "victim", so be it, (1) states unequivocally that _it_ is to blame. People on the left tend to deny that (2) obtains, and hence, that in fact the US government and not its people is partially culpable. That seems eminently sensible to me: conducting foreign policy which has for a hundred years destabilized vast swathes of the world seems ultimately at least inconsistent with the safety of one's own population. At any rate, it is something to be empirically determined by looking at the sorts of things the US has done which could support or undermine contention (1).
Some people would, however argue for (2). I am one such person. I think that those people who voted for the US government _with the intention_ of maintaining an agressive and destabilizing foreign policy are ultimately partially to blame if the whole thing goes sour. Their only defence against being charged with partial responsibility for fostering conditions leading to terror is that they were ignorant or self-deceptive about the consequences of supporting US foreign policy. Maybe this works some of the time, but for a significant part of the well-informed elites, it is quite implausible. But - and these are the clinchers - (a) I am not aware of elections in the US being settled on foreign policy, (b) tiny proportions of the population actually vote for whoever wins and (c) there is no significant difference betweent the foreign policies of the two parties they can vote for.
It is much fairer to say that those people who exert influence on the US foreign destabilizaton policy are to blame. For the reasons just mentioned, I don't think that the main influence of these elites happens by means of their votes. They have a far more direct and active participation. Personally I think that, having lost an acquaintance at the WTC, these people have done me a great injustice. But no sane person would argue that they are actually responsible for blowing the buildings up. The whole point of the debate is not on the precipitating factors of terrorism (ie. what leads some nutcases to fly 767s into buildings) but about the enabling factors, ie those factors which allow terror to gain support. And no sane person could deny that the grave injustices perpetrated by the US and its clients _contribute_ to the aggravation factors.
What's more, if I can judge the US by its media exports, it seems rather hard to actually have the truth about US foreign policy disclosed or discussed over there. Ironically, from the perspective of my argument, the mainstream media plays a big part in deterring the democracy which would have rendered US citizens partially culpable for their own deaths in this case. However, I have great faith that if US citizens knew just how bad US foreign policy is, there would be no such policy.
One question for the elites that do know and have control is: are they not actually to blame? Shouldn't they be deemed at least incompetent, at worse, criminal.
I realise that it is very hard to think in terms of partial blame, weak causation, probable connections and "factors leading to the creation of conditions"...when half your city has just been blown to bits and people you loved are dead. I am sure that a similar confusion must come over people in Palestine and Iraq. In such situations it is much easier to see blame as either total or nonexitent
Finally, there is proposition (3) which is the nasty end of the argument. There is one issue here which is whether people who terrorize the third world, or approve of the terrorization of the third world deserve to be sumarily executed together with at least 3,500 completely innocent bystandards (judging by the fact only about half of Americans vote) . I think that putting the matter so plainly should show that only tiny minorities of people would agree with it. But look carefully at (3) and what people in the left have been saying. Neither (3) nor anyone I can think of comes close to saying that 9-11 comes close to some perverse rough justice in the "morally defensible" sense that the victims were both to blame for huge suffering overseas and that such blame should invoke immediate execution. I say "morally defensible" because maybe some people would say such stuff as a horrible joke or with recklessness, not having thought through the issue properly. On the other hand, it seems to be completely acceptable that one should think both that (3) holds and that this is horrible, tragic and fundamentally wrong. One can say that on principle, the principle that people should not be sumarily executed for anything, much less voting for bad governments, and that all such murder is utterly wrong, or one can say it is wrong tactically, maintaining that killing even high officials in the Pentagon is extremely counterproductive and does nothing to solve the problem that US foreign policy is horrible. And that problem was the whole point, of course, of arguing this stuff in the first place.
Thiago Oppermann Department of Anthropology, Rm120 HC Mills Bldg, The University of Sydney
PS: Sorry for the macabre logic. Really, I am human, honest...