Blowback
In this piece, I can only conclude that Cathy Young is being intentionally obtuse about antiwar arguments.
Here in the United States, the initial wave of sympathy and outrage was quickly followed by attempts to pin the blame on the West, and on America in particular. In a letter to The New York Times published on July 9, one New Yorker proudly described his comments to a Dutch television news crew that interviewed him on the New York subway immediately after the bombings. When asked if he believed New York would be attacked again, he replied in the affirmative. Why? “Because the US is hated now more than ever. Even some of our allies sort of hate us.” And why is that? “We invaded Iraq, which has never attacked us or declared war on us.”
In other words: If we’re attacked again, it will be our fault (just as, presumably, the London bombings are the fault of British Prime Minister Tony Blair for lending his support to the war in Iraq).
If you leave your door unlocked, you increase the chances you’ll get robbed. If you get robbed, it isn’t your fault, and I don’t sympathize with your robbers. But I still suggest strongly that you lock your damn door.
Maybe Young should have read the anti-American rantings of these radical leftists:
New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank — both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States — have found that the vast majority of them are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war….
An analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior al-Qaida operatives, “the vast majority of non-Iraqi Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq.”
As Matthew Yglesias notes, if we ever get finished in Iraq, we won’t have killed all of these fighters. Where, I wonder, does Young think they’ll go after that?