Justified attacks

John Ray offers his thoughts on the "interventionism" meme.

Libertarians, Leftists and paleocons are all fond of asserting that the 9/11 events were caused by American "interventionism" abroad. Clifford May has an astringent comment on that: "That's an astonishing conclusion. The atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian. How, before 9/11, did Washington intervene in Egypt's affairs -- except to give Egypt billions of dollars, re-supply its military, and turn a blind eye to President Hosni Mubarak's repression of dissidents? Atta followed orders from Osama bin Laden, a Saudi. For more than fifty years, American "interventionism" in Saudi Arabia consisted of paying the kingdom astronomical sums in oil revenue, granting Saudis unprecedented privileges (for example, empowering Wahhabis to vet Muslim chaplains for our military and our prisons) and, in 1990, sending American soldiers, at the request of the Saudis, to protect them from being invaded by Saddam Hussein. Or maybe Buchanan was thinking about our intervention in Somalia - the only goal of which was to feed starving people. Or our intervention in Afghanistan to support guerrillas fighting the Soviet invader. We also intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo - to save Muslims from further devastation at the hands of their Christian neighbors".

I'm sure those aren't the forms of "intervention" people are thinking about. I don't happen to believe what we do is sufficient to explain 9/11 or any other attacks against the U.S., but even if we stipulate to that, I'm reminded of a thought I've been mulling over.

If the 9/11 attacks, and all other attacks against the U.S., are our own fault because of our policies, does that mean all the foreign governments we've intervened in are to blame for their policies that provoked U.S. action?

Sauce for the goose, and all that.

(Or, maybe the U.S. is the only entity in the world capable of originating independent action, and absolutely everyone else in the world, having no independent will, moves only in response to the U.S. pulling their strings.)