Andrew Volokh writes this chilling letter from Saddam Hussein to Pres. Hillary Clinton.

Dick Morris rails against Gore and Daschle in this NY Post editorial.

This is cool, and also provides some interesting details on what the US has been doing all summer.

Stephen Den Beste, in his essay Cosmic Justice, argues that the reasoning behind the current "Ask yourselves why everyone hates you" mindset is a belief in a sort of Karma, that previous bad deeds these people claim the U.S. has committed in the past has made it inevitable that someone will try to harm us. Any attempts at focusing on the Arab fundamentalism as a cause is therefore misguided since it ignores the real "root cause" that is our accumulated bad karma.

Here's a few paragraphs from his essay:

Suppose that you believe that there is some sort of force for cosmic justice. Start with that. You may think it's God or some other deity, or perhaps it's karma, or some idea of inevitability in history, or maybe it's just an intuitive feeling that what goes around comes around, or perhaps it's an ethical application of the gambler's fallacy.

It's a basic belief that at a level above simple cause and effect, that if you do evil then evil will eventually happen to you; if you do good then you will receive good. If you treat others well then you'll be treated well; if you fuck others over then you'll in turn get fucked.

...

I'm pretty sure that's what they're thinking. And that would explain why it was that they had a hard time answering the question, "Do you think we deserved to be attacked? Do you think we're responsible?" Yes and no. No, in the sense that we didn't ourselves directly cause the specific attackers to choose to do so, but yes in the sense that the real reason the attack happened was because of all the awful things we'd done; it ultimately was punishment due to cosmic justice.

On that basis, things like game theory and political analysis don't matter. From their point of view, a pragmatic mechanist like me is operating on the wrong level. I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; I'm trying to solve small problems but I'll fail because my narrow view of cause-and-effect misses the fact that there are much larger processes going on which my small solutions won't address. My kinds of plans might well succeed in making radical Arabs stop attacking us, but something else will appear in their place and we'll continue to suffer. I'm trying to avoid my fate rather than deal with it, and it isn't ultimately possible for anyone to avoid their fate.

While I think he's got some good points in this essay, I'm not sure that bringing mystical concepts like karma into the discussion hasn't forced him to make some erroneous simplifications.

After 9/11 the following arguments were widely made:

1. This happened because we had failed to engage the other countries economically, angering their peoples who were living in grinding poverty while the U.S. lived in luxury.
2. This happened because we had violated our own moral principles by sponsoring and propping up brutal and repressive regimes for our own national or corporate interests, forcing these peoples to lash out against us in self defense, hoping to force the U.S. to either liberate them or cease support for their oppressors.
3. This happened because we had angered the other peoples of the world by attempting to force our culture and values on them, either directly via political, economic and military intervention, or indirectly through our sponsorship of Israel. In their frustration these victims of american cultural/military/economic imperialism were forcded to lash out against america in self-defense.
4. This happened because we (U.S. collectively, and Carter and Clinton in particular) had failed to deal appropriately harshly with terrorists and Al Quaeda in the past, thus emboldening them and encouraging their hatred while ameliorating their fear.

Those who have read Meade's book Special Providence will recognize these arguments as corresponding to what he calls the Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian schools of thought. I don't think this is an accident -- I think that Meade's classification of American political thought is awfully correct, and the descriptions of these schools essentially lays out the axioms that underpin these schools of thought.

Anytime a member of one of these schools makes a statement such as in the previous list, he is simply asserting that his axioms are the correct ones, and moreover that ignoring those axioms tends to result in bad things happening.

Of these arguments, (2) corresponds to the Jeffersonian position, and it is this that Den Beste is attempting to explain with his appeal to karma. The other arguments, however, also ascribe a measure of blame to the U.S. for the attack. There's not particular reason to believe that all these other schools also reach their conclusion via the mechanism of cosmic justice, there's also no particular reason to believe the Jeffersonians are thinking that way.

Within the U.S., these schools tend to be somewhat blurry -- "mostly-jacksonian with wilsonian and hamiltonian tendencies" is fairly common among conservatives, for example. And just as with a parliamentary political systems there is a shifting system of coalitions over time. Jacksonians, Wilsonians, and Hamiltonians joined together for the Gulf War I. Jacksonians and Jeffersonians banded together against intervention in Somalia and Kosovo.

What has happened since 9/11 is that the Jeffersonians have become the odd school out. Jacksonians are in favor of kicking ass all over the globe if necessary to protect american interests (by which they mean middle-class interests), as long as it's a real kick-in-the-ass and not some wimpy tap-on-the-ass. Wilsonians are in favor of violence in the service of their concept of global order. Hamiltonians aren't necessarily fond of force, but they'll do it if it'll protect the interests of business.

At present, the Jacksonians are driving the administration's foreign policy. The other two schools are going along because they see opportunities for the application of their schools' beliefs in the endgame. While they believe that America's violation of their beliefs may have contributed to 9/11, military force is perfectly compatible with their concept of what a proper solution.

In such an environment the poor Jeffersonians, who abhor the use of force in nearly all conceivable circumstances, are positively screwed. For them, every action the Bush administration takes simply compounds the problem. For them, overseas meddling contributed to 9/11, so logically further overseas meddling will cause more. And the more people mock their beliefs, the more tightly they cling to them, and the more stridently they defend them. And the more they feel their isolation from the other schools, the more dislike and even hatred they feel for their countrymen, all the while proclaiming their love for their country itself.

A telling point in favor of this interpretation comes from Dilacerator who shows that Stephen's karma argument can be run in reverse against the Jeffersonians:

The point I am trying to make is that even within the Cosmic Justice Paradigm the currently prevailing strand of thought ("Blame America!") is not the only possible or valid one. Adhering to an interpretation of the Cosmic Justice Paradigm is a religious choice, meaning there is no empirical basis for either believing it, or determining how to act. Everybody will have to decide for himself what will increase or decrease the cosmic karma balance. And since it's religious and not susceptible to empirical verfication, there's no way of determining what the "right" thing to do is. Cold, hard reality is the ultimate arbiter of what works and what does not. The Cosmic Justice Paradigm lacks this vital feedback loop and is therefore doomed to languish in fuzzy thinking and counting angels dancing on pinheads.

But let's take it a step further. In the worldview of the CJP-followers, the nation-state is an abomination that needs to be abolished, individuals are unimportant and the true organizing principle consists of Groups. Now, let's look at the Group of Silly Left-Wing Intellectuals, who're now complaining that they're not being taken seriously. It's all a case a karma folks. You guys built up a lot of bad karma over the last half century by supporting evil, totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and communist China, and even cheerleading for the genocidal Khmer Rouge during their reign of terror in Cambodia. Your Cosmic Karma Balance is way, way in the red. I know you're asking yourself why everybody hates you, so you'll be happy to understand of why we do so. Modify your behavior to change your karma. Do something good for a change. Support the country that has upheld the principles that have given you the chance to be overpaid silly left-wing intellectuals.

Indeed.