Drawing a distinction between blameworthiness and foolishness

Reading various 9/11 retrospectives reminds me of a curious thing that happened after the attacks: some people, typically leftists of some stripe, would say that the attacks were "our fault", and then a whole bunch of people would angrily respond, no, it was the terrorists fault. But I think this sort of exchange shows that a distinction was not being made between blameworthiness and foolishness.

If a man gets mugged in a dangerous neighborhood in the middle of the night, we sometimes say that it was "his own fault" because he should have known that there was a good chance of getting mugged. But this is not to imply that the man is morally blameworthy for the crime--of course, it is the mugger who is blameworthy in this sense. What we are more accurately faulting the man with is having poor judgment--of being foolish enough to venture out into a dangerous neighborhood in the middle of the night.

And so I think when people say, "9/11 was our fault" or "we brought it on ourselves", what they really mean is that our foreign policy was foolish because it put America in a dangerous position. I'm pretty sure they would agree that the moral blame for the attacks rests with the people who actually carried them out.

September 11

Seven years ago, Osama bin Laden orchestrated a deadly attack on innocent civilians in downtown New York, murdering nearly 3,000 people. When an aide told President George W. Bush "America is under attack", he responded by sitting and doing nothing for seven minutes. He did not ask where the attack occurred. He did not ask if the attack was large or small. He did not ask if further attacks were expected. He did not ask if the attack was conventional or biological or nuclear. He did not ask for a single further iota of information for a full seven minutes. This was the President of the United States--after being told, simply, "America is under attack".

In the months that followed, President Bush persuaded the American public that Saddam Hussein was partly culpable for the September 11 attacks, and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a grave and imminent danger to the United States. Both of these claims were false. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

Today, Osama bin Laden remains at large. Somewhere in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he wakes up every day and breathes the air we breath and gets warmed by the sunshine we get warmed by and experiences the thousands of subtle joys of being alive--joys that he deprived nearly 3,000 innocent people of on September 11, 2001.

And George W. Bush is still the President of the United States.