Missing the Point
Canadian police have arrested seventeen Muslim suspects in an alleged plot to bomb the headquarters of Canadian Intelligence in Toronto. This leads a couple of commenters on Hit & Run to crow that it will be hard to spin the plot as resulting from American foreign policy, and another commenter to point out that Canadian armed forces have been participating in the Afghan War for three years now, which led Osama bin Laden to call for attacks on Canada as early as 2002. To which one of the original commenters, Ayn Randian, responds
SR – Did you disagree with the decision to invade Afghanistan? I can understand Iraq, but Afghanistan? Seriously.
Which is a stupendously irrelevant response.
The thesis, formalized by Pape but predating him, is that Arab/Muslim terror attacks are a response to a perceived occupation of Arab/Muslim territory by non-Muslims. The thesis is true or false regardless of whether any particular Westerner or Western group supports the particular perceived occupation. How SR feels, or I feel, about the justness of NATO’s original and/or continuing operations in Afghanistan does not matter for the purposes of answering the question of whether a particular terror attack is a response to that policy. We have in this case a country whose military and intelligence services are directly involved in military operations in an Islamic country and, some time after those operations began, a bombing plot against that intelligence service. That’s evidence in favor of the theory that military intervention in the greater Middle East tends to lead to terror attacks in response.
We might decide that a given military intervention is worth pursuing even though it leads to a rise in the likelihood of a terrorist response. Perhaps the intervention is so just or necessary that retaliatory terror is a price worth paying. But that’s a separate issue.
Comment by Dave Intermittent —
June 3, 2006 @ 7:41 pm
Confusing causation with moral culpability has been one of the constant analytical errors (or willful rhetorical stratagies) of the past three years. Sad to see that this basic diference still needs explaining.
Comment by Grant Gould —
June 3, 2006 @ 8:27 pm
I’ll see your ”causation equals culpability” and raise you a ”understanding equals condoning.” Darnit, Henley, why do you keep trying to condone terrorism?
Comment by John Emerson —
June 3, 2006 @ 10:27 pm
When was the last time anyone condoned anything? I think that the word is only seriously used in the negative.
My alma mater used to have a student-produced orientation packet, in which someone said ”Drug use is condoned at R**d”. This was no more true there than it was at a lot of other colleges (i.e., pretty much true), but someone at R**d was happy to use the word ”condone” just to be snarky.
William Bennett went ballistic on this one, and the school took a real hit for a decade or so.
Comment by CharleyCarp —
June 3, 2006 @ 11:57 pm
Wait just a minute. I thought it was our weakness that invited terrorist attacks. Or was it our freedom (which they hate so much)?
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 4, 2006 @ 3:03 am
This usefully displays how useless substitute bloggers are.
Not that I mind them as individuals. Indeed, I admire them as such.
But they are no Jim Henley, and never will be.
Also, you didn’t ask me.
I continue to not get the idea that people shouldn’t give folks time off. Probably because I take it a lot, and then suffer. We should elect a new people, clearly.
I still love Nell, and Neel is good, etc. Irrelevant. Especially since you blogged this hours ago. (And your software eliminates smiley faces, you bastard.) (Smiley here. I’m a bastard.)
(As usual, I make the italics, and correct, as ever.)
Comment by Kevin Hayden —
June 4, 2006 @ 5:51 am
I don’t assume it was or wasn’t, in part, motivated by our foreign policy. I understand you’re making a point or two about logic, rather than the specifics of the motivations of the individuals.
I’d add that I think there’s millions of people globally who are angered by our policies in action, but the vast majority don’t respond with violence or threats of violence. Some may guess that the arrested would not have taken these actions without our foreign policy as the essential motivation. But if we did that, it would be only speculation. It’s also speculation to guess that it wasn’t the essential motivation.
Which is the point you made, isn’t it?
Comment by Steve —
June 4, 2006 @ 8:13 am
Off-topically, the commenters at Hit and Run were one of the major pieces of evidence that prompted me to ask about libertarians and militarism, Jim.
Slightly less off-topically, have you read ”The Pentagon’s New Map”?
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 4, 2006 @ 10:55 am
Right-wing blogs are presently crowing that the left isn’t talking much about this event. I’m not clear what they want us to say. We’re against being blown up? Um, yes. Not much of a post there.
Beyond that, there are a lot of conclusions being drawn about the US Constitution, which is odd, given that it’s y’know, Canada. Last I looked, it was not, actually, a US state.
Not a lot of Constitutional issues there.
Comment by moonbiter —
June 4, 2006 @ 1:50 pm
This might be an unpopular question, but I have to ask it: Is targeting the intelligence headquarters of a country that is actively pursuing a war against you an act of terrorism? I know this sounds like I’m splitting hairs here, but I really, really want to be clear about the terminology we are using in this. After all, it was conflation of different things that got us into a war in Iraq in response to an attack on us by Al Qaeda.
I can’t quite put my finger on why this bothers me, but it does (the terminology that is — I’m quite clear on why a plot to blow up an ally’s intelligence agency headquarters bothers me).
Comment by jlw —
June 4, 2006 @ 2:11 pm
I haven’t followed this case much yet, but I’d like to point out that Canada has suffered South Asian terror–the bombing of an Air India plane in the 1990s–before there was a War on Terror, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else.
May not be realated, but there is a tendency to see everything through the prism of the attacks of September 11.
Comment by Andrew Ian Dodge —
June 6, 2006 @ 9:23 am
jlw: you get it in the UK too…everyone seems to forget when Muzzies tried to blow up the Israeli Embassy (which I was standing fairly near) in the late 90s. 7/7 was not the first Islamist attack in the UK