The Root Cause Crowd

Drudge Report ^ | 10.9.01 | Deb Weiss

[dennisw]

One thing for sure. She's a much better writer than you are. I at least know what the heck her point is. With you it's all over the place. Served up with a topping of get the US out of everywhere abroad especially the MidEast..... So what if Saddam and China move into the power vacuum.

This woman beats you as a strategic thinker.

[Scott from the Left Coast]

Yeah, and the "root cause" crowd is so damn good at actually figuring out what the "root causes" are (/sarcasm).

These are the same idiots that thought the root cause of the Cold War were too many U.S. nuclear weapons. They thought the root causes of poverty could be eliminated with welfare programs. They thought the root cause of out-of-wedlock birth rates was lack of access to birth control and abortions.

'Scuse me, "root cause" crowd, but I think if I need someone to ferret out the "root cause" of anything, you're the last people I'd trust to do it.

[wimpycat]

When you stick your hand inside a hornet's nest, you are likely to get stung.

Here's a better analogy: if a woman, for whatever reason, walks downtown at midnight, and then she ends up getting raped--are you going to stand over her while she's beat up and bleeding and tell her she was "asking for it" and then tell her family that the rapist doesn't deserve to be apprehended, prosecuted and thrown into prison? That seems to be your take on the subject.

[Anamensis]

Newsweek hired some Egyptian-American writer to do the "Why Do They Hate Us?" story... a root-causes tour-de-force focusing on the last 40 years in particular. And the root causes observed were as follows:

1. The Arab world's attempt to modernize using socialism failed (as it must).

2. The Arab regimes' have enacted increasingly oppressive rule over their people as a reaction to the perceived threat of modernism.

3. The oil wealth allowed the rich to import the symbols of modernism from the West (cars, clothes, McDonald's, whatever) but the regimes would not import the freedoms such as free press, democracy, and civil rights.

4. This resulted in the caricature of the West that the Arab world believes in, a hopeless place of economic stagnation and oppressive regimes, decorated by Western products that most Arabs can't afford.

5. Fundamentalist Islam rose to fill the void left by the uncaring regimes, providing social services and a sense of community (much like Nazism did in Germany).

6. The Arabs have been humiliated not only by their defeat by Israel, but by Israel's subsequent economic success.

(In an interesting aside, the author points out that Palestinians in Israel still have more freedoms and rights than Arabs in their own countries... and that if Arabs of other countries sympathize with Palestinians so much, why don't they ever help them? Because they don't really care, Palestinians are merely symbolic for the rest of the Arab world.)

In other words, the US culpability is not that of interfering too much, in the author's opinion, but too little. Whether I agree with his assessment that we need to essentially take the Arab world by the hand and lead it out of the dark, I'm not sure. But it's a far more in-depth and intellectually honest assessment of the situation than I've seen by any of the Blame America First knee-jerks.

[CWOJackson]

I'd say your problem isn't so much that people mis-understand you, the problem is that they understand you all too well.