Blaming America for Terrorism?

The Los Angeles Times is currently running a new new editorial series, "American Values and the Next President." While I rarely agree with the paper's editorials, this set of essays is worth a good read.

Yet what really caught my attention was one of this morning's letters to the editor, which was commenting on a previous installment of the series on liberty and American values. The author, J.G. Berinstein, argues the Times is playing it a bit soft:

Your editorial does not go far enough. Part of the reason citizens and Congress have acceded to the unprecedented power grab by the Bush administration is that they have bought into the notion that the U.S. faces a "stateless philosophy" that has drawn it into a "conflict without end."

I submit that the administration's war on terrorism isn't a war at all, and that the best way to reduce the level of terrorism is by altering foreign policy.

The plain truth is that current administration policy provokes terrorism. If its policies were based on respect for the right to self-determination, true freedom of religion and human rights and liberties in general, there would be far less enmity directed toward the United States.

Instead, the administration has arrogantly pursued "preventive war," "regime change," torture, imprisonment without due process and other policies that make the U.S. appear to be an overgrown, immature bully. And no one likes a bully.

Once it refashions its foreign policy in such a way as to demonstrate respect for the rest of the world, (and less of a sense of entitlement to the other countries' resources), the threat of terrorism will fall dramatically.

Well, that's a lot to think about:

Let me see, an "unprecedented" power grab? I'm sure Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt might feel slighted.

"Citizens and Congress" have "bought into the notion that the U.S. faces a 'stateless philosophy' that has drawn it into a 'conflict without end?'" Could that "stateless philosophy" be Islamic fundamentalism, which was the ideological basis for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (and I'd bet Berinstein discounts the danger of state-sponsored - but "non-state" - terror movements around the Middle East, notably Hezbollah and Hamas)? A "conflict without end? Was that the Cold War?

What about how the administration "arrogantly pursued preventive war, regime change, torture, imprisonment without due process and other policies that make the U.S. appear to be an overgrown, immature bully?"

Is it "arrogant" to wage a preventive war against a state recognized internationally as a danger to world peace, which had been in violation of over a decade's worth of U.N.-sponsored resolutions mandating full compliance with global disarmament demands? Was it "arrogant" to fulfill the promise of the Clinton administration's "Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998" when we toppled the murderous regime in Baghdad in 2003?

(I think detainee's due process rights were at issue at the Supreme Court recently, but hey, with President Bush in office Berinstein's got no time for the fine points of separation of powers.)

And how will the United States refashion its "foreign policy in such a way as to demonstrate respect for the rest of the world?" By electing a Democrat to the White House in 2008 who will adopt international multilateralism, diplomatic concessionism, and defense downsizing in the face of a worldwide movement of radicals and religious fundamentalists intent on the destruction of this country?

I don't think so, and blaming America first is the last thing we need to do in terms of generating the respect of the rest of the world.