Anti-Climacus

AN ARGUMENT AND A COUNTERARGUMENT (AND MAYBE ANOTHER ARGUMENT AGAIN):

a view like this has been making the blogosphere rounds lately: "you can't have your "Iraq is not connected to terrorism" cake and eat it too"

My temptation is to believe the underlying claim here: obviously Iraq and terrorism are connected in a relevant way, and we know that's true because OBL thinks they're connected in a relevant way.

The counterargument would be that this is false because rather than Iraq and terrorism having the same genesis is false. Spain had nothing to worry about before Iraq (or at least no more to worry about than any other country). Al Qaeda, who would be happy to take any old justification to attack another country, decided Spain would be an easy target, and constructed a story in which the justification was their involvement in Iraq--we need take this claim no more seriously than the claim that 9/11 happened because of the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia--they wanted to do it, so they did it, and later picked something that could plausibly be a reason.

But it seems like no matter how the person wishing to play down the Iraq-Spain connection tries to move, they get themselves into a corner: unless you're prepared to believe that the attack was totally random (in terms of time, targets, and size of operation), then the fact that Spain was involved in Iraq did constitute a big portion of the decision to hit them.

It looks like there's a dangerous entailment to the above paragraph, which is the view that because there is that relevant connection, and the connection only happened due to an action which Spain voluntarily undertook, then they, in some sense, brought the attack on themselves. Then again, by this logic, Britain would've had a right to attack mainland Europe when their beef was banned due to fears of BSE: the mere fact of someone deciding freely to do something does not entail the right to respond in whatever manner one sees fit.