the chickens coming home to roost argument

As I said in the other thread: it's an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, and shocking the people I've found online bringing up the argument the most aren't from countries that are affected by these supposed policies causing the distress - they're from countries who have benefitted from the US's policies and generousities.

You just can't justify something like this. The US foreign policy isn't right, I agree, but this isn't the way to do it.

I agree and disagree with Ally. I do think that what happened Tuesday was unsurprising in terms of the mindset of the alleged perpetrators. Having said that, it's pretty damn self-righteous, callous, mean-spirited, and wholly unhelpful to rub this in the faces of people who are grieving.

Obviously we have pissed of Fundamentalist Islamic people a great deal. But a more fair pay back would be something more like an oil production shut off, not this. How can this be justified. SO they resent our prescence in Saudi Arabia becasue its a holy place. Its just not called for

Problem with this kind of discourse is getting the tone right. Get it wrong and it looks like you're saying 'you deserved it'. It's an immensely tricky thing to do, esp. when feelings are so raw. I think Robert Fisk does a pretty good job in his Independent piece of yesterday, which someone else also linked to.

Nick is right - v.few people at least on these forums are saying "you deserved it". What we are saying is that the only way to actually prevent something like this happening again is to understand why it was inevitable (an inevitability US intelligence understood perfectly well). That is NOT the same thing as saying it was deserved or justified, and hopefully people can see that distinction.

People can see that distinction once they are a step or two removed from the tragedy, Tom. Expecting people to understand that while they're still pulling bodies out of the rubble might be a bit optimistic.

I for one am not at home dancing round the telly laughing at what's happened. I just wish to put some perspective on this.

I wasn't implying that anyone on this forum was celebrating this atrocity. Just trying to figure out what there is to be learned from it all and what can be done to avoid a spiral of escalating violence.

No one's saying you are, DG. What I'm saying is that, due to the high level of emotion and because this just happened, any attempt to "put some perspective on this" will be very difficult to distinguish from dancing around the television.

I'm not trying to say that anything you (or Tom, or anyone) has said is incorrect; in fact, I agree and have thought something like this was going to happen since the first WTC bombing. What I'm saying is that it isn't very empathic to be having this discussion while people ON THIS BOARD are waiting to hear confirmation that they have friends/loved ones who have died. Knowing why does nothing to ease the grief, anger, or sense of loss and objective discussion of such an emotional issue can be seen as indication that these people's lives didn't matter beyond an academic exercise. It's all about understanding the perception of your comments.

You're right of course, Dan (and the fact that carnage creates lack of perspective and blame culture is a root of the entire problem). But we're not saying these things at a candlelit vigil: we're saying them on a discussion board, where perspective and argument and distinctions are the entire point. That said, as I said to Kerry, I apologise if the tone of any of my posts has been askew, and I'll be extra-sensitive from now on.

Was saying "you're right" to Dan's first post, not his second. Which is also right. The topic now has its own thread, anyway, so hopefully people who find it unempathic will avoid the thread and people with very little empathy will avoid barging in elsewhere.

Tom: I do agree. I'm not at my most rational at the moment; I keep swinging back forth from self-loathing to incandescent fury to verge- of-racking-sobs to hysterical laughter (you can probably guess where my head's at any given time from the tone of my posts). It's not so much that these things shouldn't be discussed, or even that they shouldn't be discussed now; if a discussion of these things is going to take place now, it needs to tread about 8 million times more gingerly than it normally would if you want everyone involved to engage their logic circuits before their hearts respond.

It is no way an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. These atrocities are completely unjustifiable. To analyse why? is simply to do just that and sure, explanations can be found that all Nato states at least must recognise, all of them being prepared to kill civilians to further their cause. An attempt at explanation is not justification. We could all offer an explanation, perhaps varying widely, of why America attacked Vietnam. Few would justify it. Justifying savagely killing civilians is obscene whoever attempts to do so, as most Americans and people everywhere must surely agree. Lets not descend into moral relativism. I agree that now is probably not the time to ask why, in the face of so much suffering. Avoiding directly doing so, I bet everyone objecting to the asking of the why question could offer an explanation (justification?) for the death of half a million Iraqi children due to US/UK policy, destroying an entire society. In relation to what we are calling Fundamentalist Islam, it is entirely a phenomena of reaction. It bears no relation to Islam and the teachings of Mohammed. It is the justification in which the dark human emotions of vengeance and revenge have found form. Am I blaming the US?-NO I am not -we could give a similar explanation for its state violence. The whole situation is just tragic. peace.

Phil:

Intellectually, I agree with what you just said. Emotionally, I want to punch you in the face multiple times. I think it's your tone.

Sorry Dan, Re-reading what I wrote I immediately thought you wanker, sorry. My tone doesn't really reflect what I feel.

Howsabout we just say that there's a difference between "justification" and "explanation," and that maybe some of the more strident calls to take action should be tempered by a very thoughtful analysis of why this happened and how our actions may have shaped events.

I think the seemingly-celebratory comments stem from a basic sense of "I told you so." Many people have been cognizant of, critical of, and upset by a whole complex of events and policies over the past few decades, and their concerns have been almost completely ignored by the public at large. Such people are obviously going to feel vindicated, and are going to want to make that known for fear of being ignored again once things calm down. I do understand this; it's a matter, I suppose, of finding the appropriate times and places to express those feelings, and I fear I may have been guilty back in thread 3 or 4 of not doing that.

What it comes down to is some people seeing this and thinking, "Of course, it all goes back to x,y,z..." and being very upset that others just cry, "Why, why why."

It is a touchy subject, and one that is really difficult at this time. But someone in the Guardian - I think - put it really well when they said that the problem was that the US Govt saw this as an attack on "democracy" and "civilisation", whereas the perpetrators would have seen it as an attack on American Power - ie America as an imperialist state. And while you can argue about how true or distorted that picutre is, I'd challenge anyone to say that the US has been consistently on the side of 'democracy' or 'freedom' (however you interpret those terms) over the past century. Which is not - repeat not - to say that the attack was justified in any way, any more than the brutal treatment of Catholics in Northern Ireland pre-'69 justified the Birmingham, Guildford or Omagh. But without that understanding that, you begin to piece together the how or the why.

Aspects of American foreign policy may deserve severe criticism, but I think the case that it simply equates to imperialist self-interest and destructive interference has been overstated dogmatically in many posts of these past two days.

And I wonder what kind of state the world would be in now were it not for American resistance to fascism, communism, and the expansionist ambitions of fundamentalist states such as Iraq.

Quite right, Scott. If it were mere self-interest, I don't think I'd suggest that we bother looking at our policy at a time like this. The fact that we're ostensibly trying to improve the world is, for me, the main reason to look at those attempts when something goes horribly wrong -- so that we can honestly appraise where we've succeeded and where we have not, and how we may wish to do things differently from here on out.

Sorry, I can't take seriously any argument made by someone who thinks Iraq is a "fundamentalist" state. Them A-Rabs shore do all look alike, don't they?

Re: bizarre tagging of Iraq as fundamentalist - quite. And in fact, there's a decent argument to be made that the US equation of secularist nationalism with Communism, and undermining of those regimes (eg Iran 1953) is one of the contributing factors to the rise of fundamentalism.

The roots of the internal Middle Eastern tensions, though, lie in the botched carve-up of the Ottoman Empire post-WWI, which America had almost nothing to do with. A bad situation was worsened with the establishment of Israel. Or am I completely wrong?

Tom is, of course, right: the British and French have a lot to answer for too. Criticisms of US foreign policy we make should never be read as meaning "and our governments always do better".

Re: "And I wonder what kind of state the world would be in now were it not for American resistance to fascism"

Resistance to fascism? I'm not sure of the citizens of Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Iran, East Timor, and Angola would agree with that statement.

...Haiti, the Philipines, Panama, El Salvador, Mozambique, Indonesia...

...Iowa, Kansas, Wyoming, California, Newfoundland... YAHTZEE!

Sorry, wrong thread.