Tuesday's defense of President Obama from Andrew Sullivan is devoted to refuting Conor Friedersdorf's criticism of Obama's drone program. Says Sullivan:
What frustrates me about Conor's position - and Greenwald's as well - is that it kind of assumes 9/11 didn't happen or couldn't happen again, and dismisses far too glibly the president's actual responsibility as commander-in-chief to counter these acts of mass terror.
This is exactly backward. I absolutely believe that another 9/11 is possible. And the reason I believe it's so possible is that people like Andrew Sullivan -- and George Packer -- have spent the last decade publicly cheering for American violence brought to the Muslim world, and they continue to do so (now more than ever under Obama). Far from believing that another 9/11 can't happen, I'm amazed that it hasn't already, and am quite confident that at some point it will. How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?
Just consider what one single, isolated attack on American soil more than a decade ago did to Sullivan, Packer and company: the desire for violence which that one attack 11 years ago unleashed is seemingly boundless by time or intensity. Given the ongoing American quest for violence from that one-day attack, just imagine the impact which continuous attacks over the course of a full decade must have on those whom we've been invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting.
How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?
One of the many reasons I oppose Obama's ongoing aggression is precisely that I believe the policies Sullivan and Packer cheer will cause another 9/11 (the other reasons include the lawlessness of it, the imperial mindset driving it, the large-scale civilian deaths it causes, the extreme and unaccountable secrecy with which it's done, the erosion of civil liberties that inevitably accompanies it, the patently criminal applications of these weapons, the precedent it sets, etc.). I realize that screaming "9/11'' has been the trite tactic of choice for those seeking to justify the U.S. Government's militarism over the last decade, but invoking that event strongly militates against the policies it's invoked to justify, precisely because those policies are the principal cause of such attacks, for obvious reasons.
In fact, one need not "imagine" anything. One can simply look at the explanations given by virtually every captured individual accused of attempting serious Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The Times Square bomber, the Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, said this:
As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, officials said.
"One of the first things he said was, 'How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan'," said one law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogation reports are not public. "In the first two hours, he was talking about his desire to strike a blow against the United States for the cause."
When the federal judge who sentenced Shahzad asked with disgust how he could try to detonate bombs knowing that innocent children would die, he replied: "Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody."
Read the full article with updates at Salon.com
