Louis Menand skewers a mixed grill of 9/11 books in the 9/16/2002 New Yorker.
From the hurried muddles of the left through the vast gulf of empty pieties in the center to the hateful chauvinisms of the right; from the bizarre rituals of goddess worshippers to the dessicated metaphors posing as "analysis" from French intellectuals; 9/11 seems to have spawned a lot of really bad books and very few with a shred of good about them. Thank goodness Menand has read them so we don't have to!
With that out of the way, I do want to pick a bone with one of his points. Menand posits some definitions at the outset:
Anti-Americanism is the view that the United States is basically a global bad guy, a nation that was founded on the impulses of materialism and expansionism, and that it is getting more materialistic and expansionistic every decade. This school of thought needs to be distinguished from what one might call dissenting patriotism, which is the view that the United States is basically a virtuous republic that has recently been betrayed by runaway corporate capitalism and by the emergence of a national-security state contemptuous of individual liberties and international law.Since the chief evil that Menand finds in his assortment of 9/11 books is reductionist thinking, how odd that he would be so reductionist himself in this dichotomy. Surely some critics of America can see that both of these caricatures are historically inaccurate and that America has always had both virtues and faults.
Menand goes on to complain:
Noam Chomsky belongs to the first school. ... Chomsky's comments follow from the view that, in his words, "the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state," a position that he has maintained for many years...I don't understand Menand's beef with Chomsky. Anyone who was alive and paying attention in the 80's (my formative years) should know that the U.S. was, quite literally, a leading state sponsor of terrorism, in the form of the contra war in Central America and related endeavors. Does anyone doubt that the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were terrorists, regardless of the injustices they were fighting against? Although the specific origins of Al Qaeda may have more to do with conditions in Egypt and Saudi Arabia than Afghanistan (as the profile of Osama Bin Laden associate Ayman al-Zawahiri in the same issue amply illustrates), there is little doubt that pouring weapons, training, and the disruptions of war into the feudal society of Afghanistan both gave rise to the Taliban and created the conditions for Al Qaeda to flourish in exile from its countries of origin.Here he has recourse to the highly useful concept of "blowback." Al Qaeda, he explains, is the metastasization of the radical Muslim forces that the United States, and some of its allies, organized to resist the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan... Now the monster has turned on its creator. Bin Laden, as the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, whose views are identical to Chomsky's, put it shortly after the attacks, "has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI." ...
Blowback, as the term is used in the literature on September 11th, is intended to carry moral weight: if you insist on tramping through other people's flower gardens, you can't complain when you get stung is the general idea. But this is true, without moral implication, of any sufficiently complex undertaking. If you keep building huge passenger ships, sooner or later one of them is going to hit an iceberg, or, If you keep making rockets to launch human beings into orbit, sooner or later one of them will explode.
Menand seems to fail to understand an important difference between "blowback" and the related concept of "unintended consequences". Blowback is what happens when you commit evil or filthy acts in your neighbor's yard and the wind brings the consequences to your own; it clearly has a moral component because the acts were wrong to begin with, you had merely hoped that the resulting suffering would happen to others. Menand's ships, rockets and "sufficiently complex undertakings" are different because they represent acts which you could not have known would have evil consequences but did so despite your best efforts. In fact, of course, engineers are learning more all the time about the high probability of unintended consequences, and the more you know the more responsibility you have if you create circumstances beyond your control. In the real world, ships have been known to skimp on lifeboats and lock the third-class passengers below decks, and spaceships have payloads fueled with plutonium, creating a moral responsibility to consider what will happen if things get out of hand. So it is with military intervention or the arming of insurgents, too.
And for saying this, Chomsky earns the hot-button epithet "Anti-American".