The victims of terrorist strikes in London and New York are just as innocent as all those whose lives have been claimed in the Middle East and beyond by the often cold calculus of geopolitics. The CIA have long had a term to describe the unintended consequences of it's covert operations - it's called 'blowback' and it's principle applies just as readily to innocent peoples impacted negatively by American foreign policy decisions.

Confining ourselves to the Middle East and only to recent...