From James Bowman's The Myth of Control in The New Criterion:
Why is it that connections to our own previous acts are visible all over the place when we are being attacked while connections to the enemy’s previous actions are thin to the point of vanishing when we are the ones doing the attacking? Bush is a madman or a criminal for attacking innocent Iraqis, and yet the attacks on innocent Londoners are said, in the words of Nick Megoran, to be “inexcusable but not inexplicable.” But as the French proverb reminds us, to explain is to excuse, and the eagerness with which the Left has seized upon the actions of George W. Bush as an explanation for all the evil in the world sometimes almost provokes the doubtless unjust suspicion that the terrorists are being excused for the sake of Bush’s being attacked. Yet if sometimes his detractors simply forget to mention, pro forma, that they well understand it is terrorists who are guilty of terrorism and not those responsible for the terrorists’ real or imagined grievances, there may be an explanation for that too.
I think it is because the most cherished of all the myths of the Left is the myth of control. For those whose political starting point is the need to change the world, obviously the first article of faith must be that the world can be changed by the leaders they elect and the decisions those leaders take and the laws they pass. It is therefore fundamental to them to suppose that when bad things happen to Americans, or Britons, someone in political power in America or Britain must be to blame. “It is no accident, Comrade,” the Communists used to say, because in essence for Communists there were no accidents. And the habit of thought lives on even after the demise of doctrinaire Marxism.
Read the whole thing.
