Yes, it's true: "fervid and highly distorted accounts of the blockade of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" played (and continue to play) an important part in the recruitment of terrorists and in the creation of the friendly seas in which they swim. I wouldn't call George's view of the blockade "fervid" or "distorted," though I think it is mostly wrong. But this isn't the place to argue about that.
And yes, I believe exactly what George finds so unlikely: that the terrorists do not oppose US foreign policy for his reasons or for reasons remotely like his. But that doesn't make them inexplicable. George seems to believe that the terrorists must be rational leftists (even if they have adopted vicious methods) or else they fall off the map of the known universe. "Here be dragons." In fact they are driven by religious zeal. I don't understand that very well, and George not at all, but it is in principle understandable. The terrorists are not inhumanly evil; they are all-too-humanly evil, for both active zealotry and fanatical versions of fundamentalist theology lie well within humanity's range. America, in the eyes of Islamic zealots, is the Great Satan, and it is satanic because it is, however imperfectly, secular, democratic, and liberal--and also, of course, because it is powerful: Denmark is not the Great Satan.
George wants to seize upon the terrorist attack as an occasion for a debate on American foreign policy--as if the attack was a move in an argument, a political statement. I don't accept that view. Whatever reasons we had for opposing (and for supporting) American policies before September 11, we have still; Dissent has a substantial record of opposition, especially on issues of international justice. Whatever disagreements among ourselves we had before, we have still. In that regard nothing has changed. The only issue specifically raised by the attack is how best to resist terrorism. We had better begin by trying to understand it, and that will require, on the left, a recognition that the terror network is not a protest movement.
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