Part 1:

Go back and look. I know the moment very well. Rudy made an A$$ out of himself and was heavily criticized by everyone who wasn't a pundit or hack. Paul said nothing about deserving 9/11...that was the FOX commentators who said that (I believe the word was "invited" and it was Goler who used it). Rudy simply used Goler's words and demogogued it for cheap points....lying or showing a severe level of geo-political ignorance in the process.

Part 2:

totally irrelevant and you shouldn't even bother speculating. Nobody knows and it's a waste of time to even wonder.

a one issue guy, that's for sure.

made the distinction. The notion here started as the charge that Paul said that we deserved to be attacked. That's different from saying that some of our foreign policies were the for the attack.

This one is quite easy: all we have to do is go to bin Laden's 1997 "fatwa" and its followup a year later, where he states the reason for attacks on the US.

But we should do more./ We should plumb the depth of the intellectual environment in which this is all placed, the writings of Sayyid Qtub.

My opinion, opinion only, is that the policy matters are handy excuses for a broader rationale. Among the most important reasons in bin Laden's writings was our having kaffir troops in the holy land, Saudi Arabia. But you notice that when we left Saudi Arabia, bin Laden did not say the attacks would end. Instead, he said that our leaving Saudi Arabia was proof that we were weak, and that his plan was working.

In 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Using SL's distinction, I think it would be wrong to say that we "deserved" the attacks. But we do know why we were attacked. Japan was starving for oil. They had been getting 80% of their oil from the US, but Roosevelt had cut them off. There only recourse was to get oil from Indonesia, but to do that, they had to neutralize the US fleet, which would oppose the move.

So it would not be bizarre to say that one of the major causes of the attack on Pearl harbor was our foreign policy in the Pacific, in particular, our cutting off of Japan's supply of oil.

So, with regard to Paul's remark, do you think it is true that they would have attacked us if we had no presence in the Middle East whatsoever?

Iraq is a special case because before the Iraq war, bin Laden damned us for "propping up" Saddam and other corrupt regimes. It was only when it was clear that we might invade Iraq that Saddam became a Muslim hero, although bin Laden's call for Muslims to go to iraq is hardly a ringing endorsement of Saddam. However, the rhetoric that we are out to destroy Islam and kill Muslims was certainly fed by our bombing Iraq for 10 years, as Paul suggests. it was also fed by our own idiot lefties who fell for those phoney anti-American hoaxes like that half, or a whole million people died in Iraq because of the sanctions, or that people were dying or being made sick by spent uranium ordinance left over from the Gulf War.

The other side of this, of course, is whether we should make our foreign policy based on what others are likely to think about it. We remember that bin laden doesn't much like our policy towards Israel, nor toward Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I think Paul has strong arguments for why our policy should be different, but they are not based on what bin Laden thinks about it, nor what he might do.

It seems to me here that the simple quote you cite, which has a good amount of truth to it, although not the complete story, is not the equivalent of saying that we deserved it.

It reminds me that Scott Ritter, of the original Iraq UN inspectors, and who opposed the iraq war, also said that given the arc of our policy in iraq, from the elder Bush, through the entire Clinton administration, it didn't matter who was elected president in 2000, there would have been a war in Iraq. Why? I think he reasons that our dealing with Saddam, a real problem, was dependent on confrontation and sanctions, and the sanctions regime was not going to last. We know that Saddam's strategy was to outlast the sanctions, and resume his old ways. Ritter thought that the president would have had no choice but to react in a military way, as we had been doing all along, when the sanctions were no longer in place.

If we did not follow the Carter Doctrine, the Reagan Corollary to that Doctrine, and had simply stayed out of the Middle East, do you think we would be in Iraq today?

btw, I skimmed the article and comments. Interesting. Sort of a schoolyard fight over who should be put in which sandbox.

As for me, although i am not a Conservative, I learned Conservatism on my grandfather's knee in the fifties and sixties. There are few that he would recognize in today's politics as conservative. He would recognize the "neocons" for the JFK liberals that they are. He would recognize the "social conservatives" for the busybodies that they are, tryng to use the government to enforce their oewn morality, like liberals.. (He thought that public behaviour should be a matter of mores, not a matter of law, as much as possible, to allow each community the widest latitude in the public behaviour it tolerated. He thought mores were necessary because they led to an orderliness that was good for business. He thought that what people did in private was, in one of his favourite phrases, "None of our business." As in his voiced opposition to Kennedy's war in Vietnam, "That's for them to decide. it's none of our business. We should just stay out of their affairs.")

Would he recognize Paul as a conservative? I don't know. But he would agree with many of his positions, particularly on privacy issues, fiscal responsibility, minimal taxation, and opposition to an expansive foreign policy which counsels meddling in the affairs of others in the world.
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Is your conservatism anything like my grandfather's?

Steve, let's say I'm going to take sides against you purely because of that red bar above your name. Let's assume I lay into you with incredibly rude, profane attacks.

If you went on and accused me of attacking you purely because you are a conservative, would that interpretation of my motive be the same as saying that you deserve to be attacked?

If someone made a crude remark at my girlfriend and I responded with a chainsaw, the fact the motive for my attack was reactive to his actions doesn't mean he deserved it.