I guess I’m an interloper on the Republicans’ presidential primary debate, but I can’t help noticing that they’ve again alighted on the question of whether we should examine the role that our own foreign policy played in setting the stage for the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, whether our foreign policy played any role whatsoever in setting the stage for the attacks.
This is a silly debate in which two entirely distinct questions are intentionally conflated. First, did our pre-9/11 foreign policy play a role in creating 9/11? Of course, it did. Does anyone imagine that 9/11 would have taken place if the US were not the dominant military power in the Middle East? Into that catch-all one can add in the Persian Gulf War, US bases in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, US support for Israel, US support for Egypt. Ron Paul is saying that had we pursued a Taftian isolationist foreign policy that 9/11 might well not have happened. And again, that seems undeniable.
This only gets us to the question of whether these were wise policies in the first place and whether they were worth their apparent costs. There’s a big difference between assigning blame and recognizing some cause and effect relationships from our actions in the world. To do otherwise is simply to put more kinds of discussion off limits and fasten us more tightly to our own failed policies. And this is particularly relevant to how we unwind the trap we’ve created in Iraq, with our own presence in the country and to an extent the situation we’ve created quite apart from our presence, becoming a factory of terror for export around the world.
