>But when the narrative of the attacks became more complex, the
>Chomskian left did not. Slowly it became clear that for all its
>past crimes, the U.S. government wasn't nearly as proximate a
>cause of the attack as were, say, the governments of Saudi Arabia
>and Egypt, U.S. "allies" who'd been dancing a dicey pas de deux
>with their own Islamist radicals for twenty years in order to
>keep the lid on the domestic unrest created in part by their
>own corruption. And slowly it became clear that Osama bin Laden
>and Al Qaeda were not animated by any of the causes dear to American
>leftists: the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
>were not, it seemed, symbolic strikes against U.S. unilateralism
>with regard to missile defense, post-Kyoto energy policy, landmine
>treaties, or the rights of children. They were not cosmic payback
>for our support of Suharto or Pinochet or Marcos or Rios Montt
>or Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. They were not aimed at Katherine Harris
>or Kenneth Starr or William Rehnquist. Indeed, the more the West
>learned about bin Laden, the more we were led down strange narrative
>byways we hadn't even considered as tangents to the main event:
>he was convinced by the Somalia expedition that the U.S. was
>a paper tiger? He wants American soldiers, especially women,
>to stop desecrating the land of the two holy mosques? He speaks
>of "eighty years" of Arab abasement, harking back to the end
>of World War I?
Actually, I thought the "Chomskian left" made many of these points. Perhaps Berube could have take the trouble to quote some actual texts.
For this, we needed to take up 30k of bandwidth?
Doug