Unhappy anniversary

Four years since 11 September 2001.

Time again to read what Phil Agre said four days later.

The people who conducted those terrorist attacks are entirely responsible for what they did. They are evil, and they made themselves evil by choice. Nearly as evil are the religious authorities who provided the ideological basis of this terrible self-making with their spurious justifications for suicide bombings. Yet the call to war is precisely a call for us, formerly citizens of a democracy, to remake ourselves in the image of that evil -- to ignore all evil deeds of our own, and instead to project all of our own failings into an enemy who grows ever bigger, ever more inhuman, with every exaggeration of the extent of the danger and the need for revenge. The call to war is not legitimate: it is not capable of delivering what it claims to deliver.

I've posted before about Mr. Agre, using the words "scary and prescient." At this point, though, I'm realizing that things are worse than he forsaw, in many important ways.