Explaining It All Away

Earlier this year, after the London bombings, James Lileks wrote a screedblog on the propensity of some to blame such events on Bush and Blair.

It’s always interesting to see how people who pride themselves on sophisticated analyses and exquisitely tuned cultural sensibilities cannot see the plain home truths.  The foe sneers:  you are infidels; you die now. 

The moderns pull a face, steeple their fingers, and wonder what they really mean.   Surely this is a result of invading Iraq and forcing them to have elections. . .

Let us assume then that the Iraq campaign had never taken place. . . .

Saddam would still be in power, free to spend the Oil-for-Food money as he pleased, lavishing stipends on Palestinian suicide bombers, building up his own weapons programs without fear of international interference, having weekly meetings with Zarkawi. . . The situation in Lebanon would be unchanged; Libya would be happily pursuing its own agenda.  And we would be safer?

Yes!  Because the Arab world would not be enraged by our removal of Saddam and imposition of representational government, and we could get back to the real work of combating terrorism by addressing the root causes.  You know, tyranny and lack of representational government. . . .

Two things reminded me of Lileks’s post.  First, this exchange at yesterday’s White House press conference, between  Scott McClellan and Helen Thomas:

MR. McCLELLAN:  The Iraqi people have made tremendous sacrifices.  Our troops have made enormous sacrifices to lay the foundations of peace for generations to come and help transform the broader Middle East, which has been a dangerous region of the world that has been a breeding ground for terrorism.  That’s why it’s so important —

Q It wasn’t a breeding ground before we went in.

MR. McCLELLAN:  Helen, if we weren’t fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be planning and plotting to attack America.

Q  How do you know that?

MR. McCLELLAN:  Because they attacked us on September 11th, they attacked us — they attacked people in London, they attacked people in Madrid, they have attacked people across the civilized world.

Second, this post by Anne Lieberman — astonished that we not only accept, but explain away, things a civilized world, surer of the values that made it civilized, would have rejected as soon as they began.

When organized terrorism struck at the Munich Olympics in 1972, no government assisted Israel in seeking justice; 33 years later, we are apparently about to view a movie on the moral ambiguity of retaliation for murder.