It's a tricky business, isn't it, the relation between causality and moral responsibility? Here's a comparison for you. Joan Smith is writing about the arrest warrant served on Omar al-Bashir by the ICC:
He reacted to the warrant with characteristic spite, ordering 10 NGOs to leave Sudan and thus endangering the lives of millions of people who depend on them for food, water and protection. This is very bad news but it's clear that the responsibility lies squarely with Bashir and not with the ICC or the UN Security Council, which passed a resolution referring him to the court as long ago as 2005.
Even though the serving of the warrant is part of the chain of causes leading to the forced departure of the aid NGOs from Sudan, Smith assigns responsibility for that action to Bashir and not the ICC. That's presumably because she thinks that serving the warrant was a legit act and the reaction to it wasn't. Now here's John Pilger on the interrelation between certain recent occurrences:
[T]he cancerous effects of Britain's cynicism in Iraq and Afghanistan have come home.
The most obvious example is the bombing atrocities in London on 7 July 2005; no one in the British intelligence mandarinate doubts these were a gift from Blair.
Blair is responsible for the 7/7 bombings, then, even though he didn't carry them out, because he contributed to causing them via 'cynicism in Iraq and Afghanistan' - which Pilger obviously doesn't see as having been legit. Let's leave aside that this means Blair isn't responsible for the London bombings to anyone who thinks that British policy in Afghanistan and Iraq was legitimate. But I'm curious as to why Pilger doesn't run his reasoning the other way. Military intervention in Afghanistan, for example, wasn't the first event in world history. It was preceded by 9/11. Mustn't this mean, for him and others who think like him, that everything that's happened in Afghanistan since then was a gift from Osama Bin Laden? Mustn't it mean that illiberal security policies by Western governments are a gift from terrorist movements? Only asking - asking why that point seems to elude them, or at least not to figure very much in what they say.