Our local paper has a daily item called The Quotable File, a snippet quote of a celebrity on something or another.
I asked an editor of the paper once why the paper does it, "It's almost always something stupid and makes them sound like idiots." She said, "You got it."
If these people keep it up, I'll only be able to watch dead people. (Actually there are a few to still watch but I find it much easier to keep a list of ones I will watch than the ones I won't.)
While I didn't click on the link because I don't really care what "stars" with at best a high-school education think about 9/11, the war in Iraq, or the effects of stagflation on privatized Social Security accounts (as if), I do think we bear a certain level of responsibility for 9/11.
Not from any Ward Churchill-like pseudo-moral judgment about payback for the "little Eichmanns" dictating US policy, but from the fact that we effectively created Osama bin Laden.
We trained him, funded him, armed him, and encouraged his Mujahadin against the Soviets. Then we set him loose to cause problems in Afghanistan.
Although it was politically expedient at the time of the Cold War - the enemy of my enemy, and all that - it turned out to be shortsighted since Bin Laden's 1998 manifesto states that his rationale for attacking us was the same as in fighting the USSR - to make the political cost so high that the invaders would leave Muslim lands.
Seeing as our government spent years encouraging this militant religious conviction about the unjustness of occupation of Muslim lands, I don't see how we can make the claim that he was right to attack Russians for being in Afghanistan but wrong for using the exact same rationale to attack us for having a presence in Saudi Arabia.
This leads me to conclude that we do have some culpability for nurturing this extremist movement in the first place, which came back to haunt us twenty years later.
Bill O,
I don't think that is what this delightful actress had in mind when she said, "...America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way." I am guessing she is from the Chomsky school of everything the US does is wrong.
Also, training the Afghan/Arab resistance to Soviet occupation was the right thing to do even if it meant training fundamentalist Muslims. Our mistake was not responding to repeated attacks on the US. An ounce of prevention during the 90's would have made all the difference. We are fortunate that our wakeup call was as cheap as it was.
I don't agree with your premise. We were right to foment the Islamic extremist movement during the Cold War, which doesn't anyway translate into culpability for terrorist actions committed ten years later. The only thing US was guilty of that day was negligence.
First, it wasn't politically expedient for us to militarily engage the USSR, via proxy, in Afganistan. On the contrary, US national security interests required it. Naked Soviet aggression had to be countered indirectly, since to do so directly risked a nuclear exchange. Thus using the Mujahadin as we did was sound, effective policy.
Second, regardless of the rationale invoked, the methods and tactics al Qaeda now employs are radically different than those we cultivated in the Mujahadin. We trained and equipped the Mujahadin to engage Soviet occupation forces on a field of battle, not to direct catistrophic acts of suicidal terrorism against civilians. At the time, we couldn't reasonably have anticipated such a metamorphosis.
Third, when considered in the context of US national security, it isn't contradictory for us to contend that the USSR's occupation of Afganistan was unjust and claim our own military presence in SA was legitimate. Besides, the USSR invaded an independent country whereas we were invited by an internationally recognized government.
In retrospect, it was a mistake not to discredit, dismantle or destroy the Mujahadin and its attendent jihadist ideology when it was no longer useful to us. We certainly should have acted after this became apparent in the early 1990's. As Bill C notes above, had we responded decisively to bin Laden's attacks during the 1990's, Sep 11 wouldn't have happened. In this regard we were negligent, but not culpable.
What always surprises me is that people bother to listen to these idiots. With due respect to those few actors who are well-informed, most are pretty faces with vacant minds -- minds that are too easily filled with the mental pap that passes for thought in Hollywood. They are as easily manipulated as five year olds and, if it weren't for the power their fame gives them, really ought to be more pitied than censured.
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