Sir, - I find some of the sentiments expressed in the Letters and Opinion pages of this newspaper - that the catastrophes in New York and Washington were somehow generated by American foreign policy - all too typical of a brand of moralising liberalism that believes all crime comes from social causes, that all politics have a rational basis, and that actions such as we have witnessed must have a reasonable explanation.
If only it were so.
I used to hear it said, in a similar vein, that the conflict in Northern Ireland were, quite obviously, all about economics. If the Republic were richer than the UK, the problem would evaporate. The religious divide was only a veneer on the social and economic realities.
In the 1980s, when I last lived in Ireland, the prospect of a prosperous Republic seemed about as likely as the moon being made of cheese. Then, in the 1990s, we get the "Celtic Tiger", Ireland's economy grows astronomically, there is great prosperity.
Was there a rush from the North to join the Republic? Absolutely not. Religious and political divides there remain as deep as ever, as recent events in Ardoyne so grossly illustrate. The supposedly obvious socio-economic explanation proved to be poppycock.
Sometimes we have to accept that there are no neat answers. Sometimes worlds collide. Osama bin Laden and his ilk have their own agenda, and that stems from a world view mediated by religious zealotry. Islamic fundamentalists are not pure reactionaries, or representatives of ignored or marginalised groups that have been pushed to the limits by American policy. Bin Laden, for instance, is a multi-millionaire. He hates America for "defiling" sacred Muslim soil by sending troops into Saudi Arabia in 1990-91 to defend that country from its fellow-Muslim neighbour Iraq. He is on record as stating: "They \Western analysts claim that this blessed awakening and the people reverting to Islam are due to economic factors. This is not so. It is rather a grace from Allah, a desire to embrace the religion of Allah.
"And this is not surprising. When the holy war called, thousands of young men from the Arab Peninsula and other countries answered the call and they came from wealthy backgrounds. Hundreds of them were killed in Afghanistan and in Bosnia and in Chechnya."
It is religious fanaticism, not economics or politics, that stands at the base of such thinking. People like bin Laden may use whatever America has done to justify their agenda, but it stems first and foremost from religious fundamentalism.
So the idea that the World Trade Centre disaster represents America's reaping a harvest of dragon's teeth for its foreign policy is, in the current circumstances, pretty offensive to American ears.
America is certainly not a paradise, nor is it perfect, nor is its past milky white. But does this mean we say that Offended Group A's atrocity is somehow understandable because Target Nation B's past policies "drove them to it"? This comes very close to the mystifying mind-set that blamed the British Government for the IRA's bombs in Harrods. In the end, do we blame the victim of terrorist attack while turning a blind eye to the repulsive agenda of the perpetrator? - Yours, etc.,
Garrett G. Fagan, State College, Pennsylvania, USA.