I suppose if we merely use “invite” as a synonym for “provoke” or “give rise to,” we can say American policy “invited” 9/11, or at least served as one component of the invitation. But nobody ought to be enraged and offended by that suggestion. Rather, people are outraged and offended because to say one has “invited” something implies that one “has it coming,” that one can scarcely complain when the invited guest arrives. ~Julian Sanchez

Sanchez is replying to John Tabin, who would like to save libertarianism from the dread influence of Ron Paul.  Ron Paul, as my readers will know well, has the gall to say things consistent with being a libertarian, which is apparently a real danger for keeping libertarianism “respectable” and non-threatening. 

There were two distinct points that I tried to make in a previous post answering Tabin.  Perhaps I did not state them clearly enough.  One point is that you cannot accuse a critic of U.S. foreign policy of “blaming America,” since this conflates state and nation in a terrible, misleading way.  Indeed, this is precisely the kind of conflation that terrorists and theorists of total war make to justify the targeting of civilians, who are allegedly “complicit” in the perceived or real crimes of their government.  Maintaining a clar distinction between the state and the people, on the other hand, repudiates all such justifications for intentionally targeting civilians, whether they come from Bin Laden or Dean Barnett.  This distinction is vital to repudiating any potential justification for terrorism.  This is a distinction that Mr. Tabin apparently would like to efface, so long as it allows him to get in his shots against Ron Paul. 

The other is that even if you are in some sense “blaming” the government for the bad policies that have provoked violent terrorist responses, you are not saying that the government “invited” those attacks.  Unintended consequences are just that–unintended.  Conservatives and libertarians have normally been aware that presumably well-intentioned policies often have consequences that were unforeseen (albeit perhaps not unforeseeable).  Interventionists, on the other hand, would like us to believe that interventionism never has sharply negative consequences, while engaging in “appeasement” or failing to intervene will almost always have negative consequences.  Bombing and slowly starving a nation for a decade cannot have any radicalising effect on people in the region, but pulling out of Mogadishu has catastrophic effects.  (Actually, almost the exact opposite is the reality.)  The difference between them is that in the former we are being “strong,” while in the other we are showing “weakness.”  Replace “strong” with unjust and “weakness” with wisdom, and we might begin to get somewhere.

In just the same way, interventionists very clearly pin blame for the outbreak of wars on all those policymakers who fail to take a hard or militant enough line against other powers or groups.  Sometimes they may be correctly assessing the situation, but there is no doubt that they engage in this blame-game more than just about anyone.  As they tell it, failing to take their policy advice leads to terrible suffering and bloodshed on a massive scale.  They plainly say that policies of “appeasement” invite attack.  Neocons say this about Clinton-era policies all the time.  When it serves their turn, they have no problem saying that America very actively “invited” terrorist attacks, provided that the policies they are referring to happen to be the exact opposite of whatever they recommend.  They are quite happy to blame the government and the people for their laxity and diffidence that allowed terrorism to flourish.  In this view, when the government engages in illegal bombing or maintains a presence in a foreign country that demonstrably contributes to the motivations of terrorists, the policies are not only beyond reproach but they cannot possibly contribute to anything bad.  The policies are beyond reproach because these were, for the most part, their favoured policies.  Whenever someone complains about someone or other “blaming America first,” you have to know that the person making the complaint is really saying, “This person is blaming people like me and my preferred policies.”  That is what gets interventionists so angry–the idea that they are responsible agents who might be held accountable for the bad policies they advocated. 

So they employ the very rhetoric that they say is so poisonous and awful when it (allegedly) comes out of the mouths of their political adversaries, and then feign shock when those adversaries point out that it is actually interventionist policies that provoke violent responses.  It might seem that both sides use the exact same kinds of arguments for opposite ends, but this is not quite right, either.  Non-interventionists typically do not use this language of “inviting,”  while interventionists use it as a matter of course.  What’s more, it’s obvious that they use this language, which is why it is stunning that they would claim it is somehow an outrageous and appalling thing to say.  Maybe it is as outrageous as they now claim to find it, but in that case it is they, not non-interventionists, who should be beyond the pale.