Sauce for the Goose, Sauce for the Gander

The composer, diarist, and critic Ned Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana, a few months before my father was born in 1923.  At 96 and counting, Rorem has outlived my father by fourteen years.  He was still composing as late as 2010.  I've never been able to get much from Rorem's music, though I keep trying; but his books have given me a lot of pleasure, from the notorious Paris and New York diaries, down to Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006).

Raised a Quaker, Rorem later became an atheist, but he is still a pacifist, and I was intrigued by these remarks in Facing the Night, dated 13 June 2000 (17):

With those feminists of yore [?] who claimed that men have it better than women, one must agree, but for this crucial disclaimer: Women are not subject to the draft.  The draft eats up young males, whether they will or not, forcing them to learn how to kill their brothers in ignorance of whatever they're fighting for.  Indeed, if their male superiors - inevitably above draft age - find women so dispensable, why not form our armies from exclusively female combatants?

No, "intrigued" is the wrong word; more like "mildly offended."  Rorem is annoyingly glib and simplistic here.  Biologically speaking, men are much more dispensable than women, since human females usually bear only one child at a time, and are tied up by gestation for nine months and by early child care for several years.  Men, by contrast, can inseminate many women in a short time.  A cultural materialist like the anthropologist Marvin Harris could argue that this fact explains the male near-monopoly on military activity.

But that's the least of it.  As I just indicated, men have fiercely maintained war as a male preserve.  A popular rationale is that women are what men are defending by killing each other, either directly by keeping their opponents physically away from them or, more piously by casting women as a holy good, like the Nation itself.  (I don't know if all countries are regarded as feminine, but the US definitely is.)  It's not very convincing.  First, women (and children) have never been exempt from the horrors of war: massacred, enslaved, or raped, they have been regarded as prizes.  (The word "rape" originally meant the carrying away of women, not their forcible use by their captors, though the distinction was notional: soldiers abducted enemy women in order to fuck them.)  This reality is all over the Hebrew Bible (and indeed world literature in general), which regulates the sexual use of female captives from areas where Israel had not been ordered simply to kill every living thing.  There's also the phenomenon of military prostitution: the US military requires the nations in which Our Boys are Protecting Democracy to provide them with comfort women, among other vital services.

Second, like male-homosocial spaces in general, the military has traditionally been regarded as a refuge from women who might nag men to wipe their butts, pick up their underwear, take out the garbage, or refrain from blowing their noses on the floor.  Ironically, perhaps, joining the army is just going from the frying pan to the fire in this respect, from the demands of nagging moms to abusive drill sergeants and endless chickenshit barracks policing.  I suppose that the deadly masochism of the male is a factor here; women express their version of this syndrome through heterosexual marriage.  So I don't take the claim of "defending our women" very seriously: military men and organizations view women as more dispensable even than men.

One reason I like the term and concept of "patriarchy" is that, as someone has defined it, it arranges people of both sexes by their relationship to older men.  Do the Fathers care about the young men they send to war?  Not very much, and they manfully subdue their care in the service of Higher Values like power and profit.  Do they care about the young women they claim to be defending and protecting against the buck Negro, the Mexican, the Hun, the Gook, the Hajji?  Oh, my dear, possibly even less than that.  Male supremacy might be the last survival of feudalism and its forerunners.  But Enlightenment values have not managed to improve things much in this area.

I also noticed that at the time Rorem wrote those words, the United States hadn't had a draft for decades.  (Though, true, young men were and are required to register in case the draft is reinstated.) And of course, increasing numbers of women have been going into combat to defend Our Oil Companies (which really are sacred), where they too can be maimed and killed, or maim and kill others.  Equality, yay!  Maybe I shouldn't expect even a gay man of Rorem's vintage to have a very nuanced grasp of sexual politics, but his view of war and the military also leaves a lot to be desired.

Men have been whining that they have it rough too at least since the advent of Second Wave feminism ("feminists of yore"?).   They tend to ignore the fact that feminists have been vocal about the harm done to men by patriarchy all along, and have tried to engage them in the effort to eradicate sexism.  I suppose the problem is that feminism is run by, y'know, girls, and they want their own show; even collaboration as equals seems unacceptable.  A men's movement against sexism is fine with me, but what we've had always ends up blaming women for men's disadvantages, perhaps because blaming other men is so much scarier.  Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote a lot about this problem in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976).  I've quoted her before, but today I'll add this observation; rereading it reminds me just why I found Rorem's remarks so faulty.

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are [215ff].

"Self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement" says it very exactly.  If I were like many people, I'd call Dinnerstein prophetic; but she was describing a problem of her own time, and much older.  I'm not putting Rorem down, however; I enjoyed Facing the Night very much overall, and it gave me more than just this bit to write about here.

The Four Freedoms for the Twenty-First Century

I got a mailing from my Congressman today, composed of a column he published in a newspaper somewhere.  The subject line was "America: Worth Fighting For."

It begins with the standard blather about ordinary Americans having cookouts with their families on the Fourth, and how my Congressman hung out with veterans who fought to keep our country free before returning to Washington DC where there are apparently no veterans; and then a Thomas Paine quotation: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value."  (I wonder if my right-wing Republican Congressman knows what a radical anti-Christian Paine was.)

Our country has always been fought for, and we must ensure it is always worth fighting for. Every generation of Americans has bravely faced threats from abroad and challenges from within. Today, our troops are fighting for peace in the face of terror, and back home we are grappling with how to ensure the next century is an American one. Our men and women in uniform put their lives on the line every day in the name of the very words we celebrate today: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This boilerplate posing is so familiar that one hardly pays it any attention.  But it's a tissue of pernicious lies.  Notice, for example, "how to ensure the next century is an American one."  Almost certainly that's an anti-immigrant dogwhistle, though it could also be about economic competition with China.  Maybe both.  The real internal "challenge" comes from the racist Right, and the wealthy oligarchs who believe that they should run the country and the world.

It's false that every generation of Americans "has bravely faced threats from abroad."  The United States has been an aggressor at least often as it had to defend itself, and since the end of World War II we have not fought a single war of self-defense.  The same goes for the claim that "our troops are fighting for peace in the face of terror": our endless war is a war for domination of the entire world.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't things about America that are "worth fighting for."  If we were attacked from without, defense would be completely proper.  Defense, even retaliation, was not out of place after the September 11 attacks; the wretched irony is that Bush chose to retaliate against everybody except the attackers.

In that light, we should remember that the American continents were worth fighting for, for the pre-Columbian peoples; Korea was worth fighting for, for Koreans; Vietnam was worth fighting for, for Vietnamese; Cuba was worth fighting for, for Cubans; Palestine is worth fighting for, for Palestinians; Afghanistan is worth fighting for, for Afghans; Iraqis thought that Iraq was worth fighting for; if it comes to that, Iranians and Venezuelans and Koreans once again will hold their countries worth fighting for.  But this can't be admitted by patriots: there is only one country worth fighting for, as far as they can recognize.  They are indignant when the citizens of another country defend it against a US invasion.  If you really want the ratification of Americans' love of country, however, you have to grant the validity of other peoples' love of theirs.

In a broader sense of "fight," many Americans have fought for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: abolitionists, runaway slaves, opponents of US wars of aggression, the Civil Rights Movement, the defenders of civil liberties, working people, women, gay men and lesbians and transgender people -- everyone that people like my Congressman would rather forget about, and certainly have no interest in celebrating on the Fourth.

What followed made my eyes bug out:

That’s why, in Congress, I work every day to ensure our country’s policies reflect the values that our men and women in uniform are fighting for:

    freedom to spend your hard-earned paycheck for your family, not give it all to the government;
    the opportunity to turn an idea into a Fortune 500 company, not be limited by government overreach;
    the freedom to think differently from your neighbor without persecution or stigma;
    a doctor-patient relationship without the government signing your prescription.

Essentially, it is the ability of every American to pursue their American dream.

Today, on the Fourth of July, I’m reminded that our American values, the freedom and independence we declared 243 years ago, are always worth fighting for.

This, I presume, is the right-wing Hoosier version of FDR's Four Freedoms.  Yeah, that's what Tom Paine cared about: his right to pay no taxes on his Fortune 500 company.  That's what the Second World War was about, the freedom to be a Nazi without persecution or stigma.  And that's what our men and women are fighting for today: the right to go bankrupt from medical bills, assuming you can afford a doctor-patient relationship in the first place.... Since solid majorities of Americans, even Republicans, want a government-run healthcare system and higher taxes on the rich, my Congressman has to be delusional.  But he doesn't stand alone: the Democratic Party leadership shares his delusions, no less than the Republican elites.  Joe Biden would be happy to reach across the aisle to him.  There must be something hallucinogenic in the swampy water of Washington, D.C.

What That Word It Means To Me

Disrespect invites disrespect, violence invites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.

There's been a lot of predictable kvelling by liberals about Meryl Streep's denunciation of Donald Trump at the Golden Globes last night.  I haven't bothered to watch the video or read a full transcription, because frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.  Just as predictably, the Right has responded by telling Streep to shut up and act, though they're just fine with right-wing actors and other celebrities expressing their opinions.  As Glenn Greenwald tweeted today:

Why are actors less qualified to comment on political issues than, say, cable TV or talk radio hosts? Never understood this rationale.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 9, 2017

Of course, the content of actors' and other celebrities' opinions is open to criticism, just like cable TV or talk radio hosts, or corporate media pundits for that matter.  Someone posted a meme on Facebook quoting Streep's words that I quoted at the opening of this post, and I thought, Oh, really?  Where were you, Ms. Streep, when Barack Obama joked about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones?  When Obama and his toadies mocked gay people who protested in Washington about the antigay policies he clung to for most of his first term?  When they denounced his left-wing critics as "fucking retarded" and drug-addled losers?  When his goons were harassing and beating protesters at various public events?  When Obama was not just joking about killing people, but actually killing them, as he has been doing for his entire time in office?  Did it bother you when Obama bragged about being the first two-term war president?  Do you worry about the consequences of Obama's fondness for mass killing and high-tech violence, either directly or through proxies?

By all means, pick on Trump; he deserves it and will continue to deserve it.  But I'll reserve my respect for people who speak out against disrespect and violence committed by Democrats no less than Republicans.

It's All Fun Until Somebody Loses an Eye: From the "No One Could Have Foreseen This" Casebook

It looks like the US had another one of those "Oops!" moments in Syria recently.

The Pentagon warned the Syrian government Friday not to strike U.S. and coalition personnel in Syria, a day after the regime carried out airstrikes in an area near American special operations forces, prompting the U.S. to scramble jets to protect them.

Daniel Larison, who wrote about this incident, pointed out that the longer US troops remain in Syria, no matter how "non-combat" their role supposedly is, the more likely it is that the protection will fail and an incident will turn into an excuse to invade.

When the U.S. backs proxies in a foreign civil war and puts U.S. forces on the ground with them, it opens the door to new and unexpected conflict with other armed groups in the country. By extending protection to U.S. proxies in Syria, the U.S. could find itself drawn into yet another conflict in Syria. Anti-regime groups would have a strong incentive to put the U.S. in that position. The more U.S. forces that are sent into the country, the greater the chances of an incident that could lead to a wider war, and Clinton is on record in favor of sending more special forces into Syria. This episode underscores the absurdity of the administration’s many statements that U.S. forces aren’t in combat in Syria, and it reminds us how quickly a supposedly “limited” intervention could spiral into something much worse.

I wonder again: what are US forces doing in Syria -- a country which is neither our client nor our ally, with whose government we aren't even nominally friendly, but with which we are not, supposedly, at war either?  Suppose that some foreign government, Russia for example, were to station its troops in the United States in order to extend protection to its proxies here.  Suppose some other country were to decide that white supremacists, say, were its proxies in the United States.  Suppose Mexico decided to station some of its troops in the US to protect its citizens here -- in a purely advisory, non-combat role, of course.  Would most Americans, regardless of their party affiliation, consider such intervention and presence a sign of that other country's disinterested commitment to peace?

It's tempting to speculate that US troops are in Syria as bait, with the conscious intention that some of them will be hurt or killed by the bad guys so that the US can invade and kill lots of civilians, including children.  (The recent viral photo of a little boy, a drowned refugee, outraged so many Americans -- nobody gets to hurt or kill Syrian kids but us!  When that picture turned up on my Facebook feed last week with much lamenting about the sadness of this world and the badness of people, but what can you do, I pointed out the US' support for Saudi Arabian killing of civilians in Yemen, which Americans could do something about by pressuring our government to stop its participation in the atrocities.  The reaction (or rather, non-reaction) was predictable.  It's so much more satisfying, as Noam Chomsky has been pointing out for decades, to weep about the crimes of our official enemies than to notice the crimes of our friends.)  If Hillary Clinton wins this election, it's a good bet that US intervention will escalate; but very possibly Trump will do the same if he's elected.

Still, going by the US' record, our leaders aren't thinking that far ahead; they are, on the evidence, too stupid to do that.  It never occurs to them that if they put American troops in hostile territory, someone will shoot at them.  I recently saw an item about US troops in Ukraine a couple of years ago, where some of the locals threw stones at them.  Again: what were US troops doing in Ukraine?  One can't expect grunts to have a realistic idea of what they're getting into, I know, but the Wise Leaders who sent them there should have known better.  It wasn't the Existential Danger Donald Trump who made these blunders, it was a Democratic administration -- but Republican politicians and pundits have been agitating for a US invasion of Syria for years too.  But no one could possibly have foreseen that anything would go wrong.  We are America, after all, and nothing ever goes wrong on our watch.

Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice, I'll Vote for You

The other day Daniel Larison wrote a good post about Hillary Clinton's role in, and major responsibility for, engineering the NATO air war against Libya.  It should be as serious a liability for her Presidential campaign as, say, Jeb Bush's approval of his brother's invasion of Iraq, but it probably won't be.

Larison takes the opportunity to list some of what critics of the Libya "intervention" wrote about it at the time:

We suspected that the justification for the intervention was exaggerated or simply false. We argued that the motivation for it was likely ideological.  We observed that support for the war was based in a misguided belief that the U.S. could get on the “right” side of the “Arab Spring” and that the U.S. would then enjoy a “new beginning” with people across the region. We noticed right away that the administration exceeded the authority provided by the U.N. resolution, and we understood that it was seeking regime change from the start despite Obama’s claims that this was not the goal. We pointed out that the war actually violated the requirements of the “doctrine” that it was supposed to be vindicating. We pointed out that interventionists were staking the reputation of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine on the outcome of the Libyan war, and helped to discredit the doctrine they were using to justify intervention. We noted that attempts by the African Union and others to mediate the conflict were brushed aside and ignored by the intervening governments.

This, along with a rereading of my own posts on Libya, reminded me of what I've been reading lately about Republican mendacity about the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  There have been a lot of online opinion pieces and memes about how we were lied into Bush's war, which is true enough.  But equally true, we were lied into Obama and Clinton's war on Libya.  The two cases aren't identical, but there are a lot of similarities, starting with the falsehoods used to push the intervention, the way official rationales changed daily as expediency required, and concluding with the devastation of the country and descent into civil war when it was over -- over for NATO, that is.  The Good Guys we were supporting, the rebels, turned out to be thoroughly bad guys after all, but of course no one could possibly have foreseen that, and we had to do something.

So, as Larison concludes:

The war’s supporters largely escape blame for being so horribly wrong about the intervention, and the war’s opponents are typically never credited with having warned against the disastrous blunder before it happened.

This is true of the Iraq war too.  Because those who opposed it turned out to be right, it is all the more imperative that they be ignored and forgotten.

I see two crucial differences between Iraq and Libya.  For Democratic loyalists the important difference is that the Libyan bombing was the work of a Democratic administration, so of course it can't possibly be compared to Bush's invasion of Iraq.  The other difference is that US ground forces weren't involved, so there were no American casualties, and the scale of destruction and slaughter among Libyans was much smaller than among Iraqis.  This is vital.  Republicans are squirming to evade their responsibility for the invasion of Iraq, and to rewrite the history to justify it, because it cost the US an enormous amount in "blood and treasure" as the cliche puts it, and with the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq, Bush's failure to produce a satisfactory outcome can't be ignored by Republican presidential candidates.  Libya, by contrast, can be ignored.

That's why it will be relatively easy for Clinton to evade responsibility for the debacle.  As one commenter on Larison's post wrote, "Mention Libya to a typical Republican, and their first response will probably be something like ‘you mean Benghazi’? And this will no doubt be the angle for whichever Republican candidate runs against Hillary."  I suspect that the typical Democrat will also think of Benghazi when Libya is brought up:  anyone who is critical of the attack on Libya is obviously a Republitard who wants to blame Hillary for Benghazi.  That makes it easy for both parties to ignore the real human cost of their wars, because if there's one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on, it's that only American lives matter.  That's the Republicans' PR problem: every veteran with a prosthetic limb, every homeless, traumatized veteran in your town or on TV is a reminder of Bush''s wars.  (That many of them are veterans of the war in Afghanistan, which Obama escalated and has kept going throughout his terms, is no help, since no adult can forget who started that war to begin with.)  But Libya?  Libyans have to live with the consequences of Obama's and Clinton's "humanitarian intervention," but Americans don't, so Obama's and Clinton's lies about their wars aren't likely to bother the Democrats who are indignant about Bush's, Cheney's and Rumsfeld's dishonesty.

Hey, Everybody! Let's Put on a War!

I'm almost done reading Michael B. Young's King James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality (Macmillan, 2000), a book I've often seen cited but hadn't got around to reading until now.  It's given me a much fuller picture of James and his reign than I had before, and I may write some more about it soon.  But for now I wanted to pass along an interesting passage from later in the book, about James's distaste for war and the reaction to it in some English circles.

After James died in 1625, his son Charles and his boyfriend George Villiers*, the Duke of Buckingham, promptly abandoned what Young calls James's "pacifism":

First there was the war on the continent.  Thomas Scott, the pamphleteer who had so fervently advocated war, was delighted with the transformation of the English into a fighting people.  Speaking now through the manly voice of Sir Walter Raleigh, Scott observed that 'Englishmen, who for the space of twenty-two years before, had but as it were dallyed and played with Armes, rather seeking to affect it for novelty then necessity, were now, in one yeares deliberate and materiall exercise, become so singular and exquisite' that they excelled the Netherlands in military prowess.  Under James, England's 'ease had made her grow idle', but now every child aspired to be a Hercules, and the whole island had become a 'Nurcery of excellent and exquisite Souldiers'.  In 1626 Scott was murdered by a soldier.  Life does have its ironies.

I'm tempted to say that the US might be better off if some of our warmongers suffered something like Scott's fate.  But I won't give in to that temptation.  Just the other day on Facebook someone wrote complaining about a bad experience he had with an online retailer, who refused to give him a refund on a purchase he found unsatisfactory.  Should he publicly shame the dealer on Facebook? he asked.  "In the great grand scheme of things, this is irrelevant. But also in the great grand scheme of things, I believe that karma is a bitch if you are."  I pointed out that karma cuts both ways, meaning that if this guy decides to take karma into his own hands, karma is supposed to turn around and bite him on the ass.  But people with vengeance (and macho pride) on the brain never think that far ahead.  (I don't believe in karma myself, but I was put off by his invocation of the doctrine in service of his personal pride.)

Scott's fate serves as a  metaphor for the war effort in general.  The war expanded to include Spain and France.  It brought the nation to the point of bankruptcy and political breakdown, and it led to the death of approximately 20,000 British fighting men.  James would not have been surprised.  In the words of Sir John Oglander, James 'was a good king and, in his death, said that our nation could not be contented for they desired war, and he prophesied that, when he was dead, they should have more war than they knew how to manage' [102-3].

Many people enjoy talking about war, strutting around with their chests puffed up and bellowing "We're Number One!"  In the same way, for many people, marriage is about weddings: the clothes, the presents, the spectacle, the overspending!  It's much the same for war: people love fantasizing about the uniforms, the parades, the sacrifice (almost always by other people), the spectacle, the overspending!  As with George W. Bush's Afghan and Iraq adventures, Charles's wars stopped being so attractive after they resulted in economic disaster for England and much loss of English life.

What Young is concerned with is the role of gender in such discourse.  James's homosexuality certainly was a factor in the reaction to his lack of bellicosity -- he was quite capable of violence when his majesty was impugned, however, imprisoning, exiling, and murdering rivals and critics -- but I think this was mainly a convenience.  Had he been exclusively heterosexual, he still would have been called effeminate and accused of buggery for refusing to entangle England in the wars that Elizabeth I had found necessary to compensate for being a mere woman.  That the accusation was probably true in James's case is unimportant: in the warmonger's mind, lack of aggression equals pacifism equals effeminacy equals taking it up the butt.  Any term in that equation can stand in for the others.

*Yes, I phrased that somewhat ambiguously.  I intended to.  Though Buckingham was James's boyfriend, and Charles was a militant flaunting heterosexual, Buckingham stayed on as a royal favorite well into Charles's reign.  Maybe Charles 'experimented,' or wasn't as able to reject his father's example as he wanted to; but that's just my speculation.  In any case, only after Buckingham's assassination, according to Young, did Charles settle down into domesticity with his wife Henrietta Maria, who became pregnant for the first time a few weeks after Buckingham's death, three years after they married.

Democratic Civilization - A Good Idea?

I'm a bit more than halfway through John Horgan's The End of War (McSweeney's, 2012), which I mentioned in the previous post.  It's a good read, and goes well with David Swanson's harsher (but still valuable) War Is a Lie.  Horgan makes a good case that war is not innate in human beings, and we can abolish it if we want to.  The trouble, obviously, is that many people don't want to, and many others are fatalistic about it -- which is another way of not wanting to stop it.

At one point Horgan describes a 2010 conference on warfare at Ohio State University, mostly conducted by military historians and soldiers.  ("Soldiers" is misleading; it doesn't mean grunts, it means officers.)  The general mood was pessimistic and fatalistic, as you'd expect from such a group.  This exchange is revealing:

Equally pessimistic was the sole non-historian who spoke at the conference, a four-star Marine Corp general named James Mattis ... Mattis believes that war is eternal, because civilized democracies like the U.S. will always have enemies, whether Nazis or Islamic fundamentalists.  "The enemy is going to continue to be there, the enemy of what I call the values of the Enlightenment," Mattis said.  "The nature of man has not changed, unfortunately.  And it's not going to change anytime soon, I don't think.  So we are going to have to be ready to fight, across the range of military operations, whatever the enemy chooses to do.

Mattis apparently subscribes to the "bad apple" theory of war, which holds that even if most of us want peace, incorrigibly violent, aggressive people will keep dragging us back into war.  Two months after the Ohio meeting, Barack Obama -- who, you might recall, has declared that we will not eliminate violent conflict in our lifetime" -- put Mattis in charge of U.S. Central Command, with oversight of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Pessimism pervades the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth [117-8].

It's certainly ironic if Mattis does subscribe to the "bad apple" theory of war, because he's one of the bad apples.  So is the country he serves, which was built by war.  As Horgan paraphrases it, Matthis thinks that "civilized democracies like the U.S." which befriend "what I call the value of the Enlightenment," don't cause wars: it's our "enemies" who do.  But a look just at the US' record of aggression since 1945 shows this to be an absurd claim.  The Korean Civil War resulted from US interference in Korean affairs, and in any case neither North Korea nor China attacked the United States.  The US invasion of Vietnam was similar: the US stood against Vietnamese self-determination, partly because of a paranoid conviction that Ho Chi Minh was a Soviet puppet; US territory was never endangered, let alone attacked.  Our present war in Afghanistan is more complex, but it boils down to the same thing: it wasn't Afghanistan that attacked us but (apparently) the international network al-Qaeda; the 9/11 attacks were planned all over the world, including Germany (which we have not invaded for harboring terrorists), and most of the hijackers were Saudi.  Far from keeping America safe, as Obama insists at every opportunity, the war in Afghanistan is giving many people more reason to want to attack us.  "The enemy" doesn't come sneaking around to whop us upside the head; we keep creating enemies, in the name of civilization and our Enlightenment values.

I don't mean to blame all war on the US, of course.  The US is not the source of all evil in the world.  Even if we stopped committing aggression and terror, there would other bad apples besides us to make trouble.  And like us, they would claim that it wasn't their fault, it was someone else's.  They'd most likely be lying, just as American apologists are lying when they refuse to consider the possibility that our country is responsible for the crimes it commits.  That refusal, whether by Americans or by others, is the most immediate cause of war.