Kumbaya Watch: The Nation
The latest in anti-American commentary.

By Ross Douthat
September 19, 2001 9:25 a.m.

oining the "we-had-it-coming" school of post-terror thought, Joel Rogers of The Nation makes the usual noises about "the inexcusable terror of what has just been done to us," and then gets down to the business of pointing out that "our own government, through much of the past fifty years, has been the world's leading 'rogue state.'" Indeed, he goes on, "merely listing the plainly illegal or unauthorized uses of force the US was responsible for ... would literally take volumes." Which is convenient, since it enables him to avoid naming a single such instance in his essay. Instead, Rogers approvingly cites an Amnesty International report from the mid-1990s, which declared that the U.S.A. "shares the blame" for the fact that "throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman, or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed ... at the hands of governments or armed political groups."

Given this supposed reality — and given the supposed existence of "the bodies of literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents, most of them children, whose lives we have taken without any pretense to justice" — Rogers can only wonder why people are so surprised at last week's attack. Quoting W. H. Auden ("Those to whom evil are done / Do evil in return"), he writes that if "the immediate relatives and descendants of our own terror now comprise or tolerate a group of maniacs intent upon a similar destruction of innocents in the United States ... [it] should be mourned, and must enrage, but it cannot shock." Sure, they're terrorists — but then, he implies, so are we, and the events of September 11 are just a taste of our own medicine.

"Now I'm not saying he should have killed her," Chris Rock used to joke about O. J. Simpson, "but I understand." Apparently, Joel Rogers feels the same way about Osama bin Laden.