Dope.

I try to run this place like a Punch and Judy show. Usually, I play Punch, and I get some conservative retread to play Judy. And of course I'm enthralled by my own theatrics.

Well... reluctantly, I want to play this game with an idea that is going around the lefty pole of the media spectrum. As Seumus Milne put it in the Guardian:
" Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

"...any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent."

There's a number of things to say about that.
1. The assumption that the hijackers were representative is nonsense. They were merely successful.

The Seumus Milne line starts out with an assumption that I certainly agree with - the real opinions of the masses in the poor countries, from Pakistan to Rwanda, are simply ignored in the West. Unfortunately, the gesture of ignorance is then repeated. Who says that the hijackers of the airplanes are in any way representative of Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon - their nationalities, as reported at least in the American press? To pretend that hating the US is a progressive act in Egypt is to ignore what I thought we all learned in Iran - there are many ideological variants of hate. The people associated with the hijacking belong to a rather rebarbative, and certainly fascist, variant. The inference that hate has a cause must be true -- but that it is a cause we should sympathize with isn't. The Jews were well hated in Nazi Germany - does Milne really think that was the fault of the Jews?

2. The US has blood on its hand. This is certainly more than true. The US has pursued a barbaric policy in Iraq, and it has provided Israel with support even when Israel has used its American sponsorship to create an apartheid state that systematically discriminates against Palestinians and favors Jews. But to see this as the only US policy in the Middle East is incredibly shortsighted. The US also has close ties, via its oil empire, with the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other Arabic states and factions. The US routinely creates ties with the ruling class in many poor countries, has sponsored death squads all over South America, tilted towards Pakistan when Pakistan was committing genocide in Bangla Desh... hey, I could go on.
But there is a rule of relevance, here. When the US attacked Nicauragua in the 80s, it was often pointed out that the Sandinistas were persecuting the Misquito Indians - in fact, Daniel Ortega himself admitted this. Did this justify US intervention? No. For a number of reasons, I felt, back then, that nothing in International Law, or my own conscience (which countenances a certain amount of violence for progressive ends - which is why I felt the Viet Minh and their successors were legitimate) could justify what Reagan was doing in Central America. In the same way, the groups that have been associated with the WTC atrocity have no justification for spilling American blood. So far, we don't even know what they stand for - which is condemnation enough. To kill five thousand people without bothering to even write a note about it shows a contempt for human life not even equalled by your average suicide. So Milne engages in a little psychological projection, which, to my mind, is as patronizing as anything I have read on the right.

3. The word hate. Hmm. Milne uses that as the keynote - the US is hated bitterly -- without considering it as a more complex emotion. US pop culture, the US as a destination, the US as both overbearing, politically stupid tyrant and as the 'petit chose x' -- Lacan's obscure object of desire - are the intertwining forces in the Third World. This isn't to defend the New World Order - the preponderance of wealth, which is in Europe, Japan and the US, has a direct and terrible relationship with the preponderance of poverty, which is in the Global South -- but to ask a question about the psychological coordinates of that situation. Much as the shorthand of hate seems relevant to the WTC assault, I don't think the hijackers would have done it if they were doing it for hate. Hate was balanced by affection -- affection for another order. This order is one Milne doesn't really want to look at. It is certainly not the order of socialism -- the Afghans were kicking Russian butt precisely because they didnt want that socialist feeling. It is the order of sharia. If Milne thinks that this is going to be satisfied with a more just distribution of the world's goods, I think he is wrong. This is about theocracy, about what the worship of God requires, about the relationship between the sexes, about corruption. It is about a mix of changes in the Middle East, and I even have some sympathy with the corruption issue. In the end, though, it is about mandating a lifestyle I find abhorrant - and more, that I don't have to live in. Seeing someone oozing with the luxury of sympathy for these Holy Warriors while never having to face the consequence of living in the order they dream of brings out the militant Orwell in me. Milne, who thinks that Americans 'simply don't get it," doesn't seem to get it himself. Instead he immediately broadens this incident, as if we were still in the Nassar era, where we were all going to adjust to secular norms and dam the Nile and we could talk about the solidarity of the Third World masses.
That epoch is long gone.