Where is it written, for example, that "democracy" is some goodie that Iraqis and Afghanis must "get" at practically any cost in blood and treasure to those peoples as well as to non-Iraqis and non-Afghanis? (Remember how only yesterday we were narrowly obsessed only with protecting ourselves from "weapons of mass destruction"?) I detect in Blair’s tone irritation with those who would subject the swirl of events in which we are caught up, as in a tornado, to calm historical, causal analysis. By pathologizing such an effort as "frankly complete nonsense" Blair implies that those who would engage in it are morally defective.

To render a morally outrageous behavior intelligible by setting it within a context of reasons, i.e., motivations, is not to justify that behavior. Neither is it to suggest that we ought not to criminalize the behavior and apprehend and punish those who engage in it.

It is, rather, to make the behavior-generated problem more manageable. It does so by inviting us to inquire whether other behavior, perhaps our own, has over time motivated the ill-behaving ones to do what they do and to the extent that they do. Having completed that inquiry, we would not necessarily change our behavior, but at least we would know whether, and to what degree, one of its generative factors was ever within our control. We may even conclude that any such behavior modification on our part would not matter, in the sense that future instances of the morally outrageous behavior that we already provoked are likely to occur, even if we should repent of them in sackcloth and ashes.

The salient point is that in the case of morally outrageous human behavior we are not dealing with an impersonal natural phenomenon like, for example, a volcano whose future eruption we are helpless to control. Like the people who choose to live near volcanoes, we attach a cost to our present and past behavior and then, in accordance with our principles and with an estimation of the risks and costs of a prospective course of action alongside its expected benefits, we decide and act. So, for example, while we keep watch over our children as best we can and teach them to be careful, we will not lock them in basements just because some men would prey on them in the streets. Rather, we attach a heavy price to such predations and monitor known predators' every move.

It may be that it is better to risk suffering the evil consequences of the ill-behaving ones while attempting to render them harmless than to renounce our "provocative" behavior. But in that case we ought be in command of the historical facts and be quite clear about who "we" are. That is, who has decided that the cost of persistence in which behavior is worth the cost that some people obviously bear more heavily than do others? How do those many others relate to the deciding few? Just why has there been a Western military presence on Muslim lands? To protect Israel? To protect the flow of oil? These are intelligible motivations. But are they sacrosanct? I doubt that the people who pay dearly and in many ways to maintain that presence would think so.

We study World War I and its aftermath, for example, not to find a “sliver of excuse” for Hitler’s crimes, but to understand whether there were any actions on the part of the belligerents (and later victors) that they could have avoided, thereby making the war, and Hitlerism, impossible. (World War II is unthinkable without Hitlerism which, in its concrete historical existence, is in turn unthinkable absent World War I. Someone tell me quickly: What great good came out of “The Great War” next to which the enormity of World War II is not worth mentioning?) We engage in that sort of thought experiment, not to reverse history, but to learn lessons for the present situation. For the latter is not sui generis, an anomaly with no known analogies. It is rather an all-too-intelligible example of the cumulative effect of decades of direct and indirect military interventionism for the benefit of particular interests – oil and Israel, Israel and oil – while rationalizing it with lies about universal benefits. To pretend otherwise is frankly complete nonsense.