Push Back

It's hard to articulate everything I want to say about Churchill's piece. Like everyone else, I suspect, I instinctively want to respond to him in a non-rhetorical context. Be that as it may, I'll attempt to look at this in that context first. A striking characteristic is the almost complete lack of ethos. I suppose as a work put forward by and academic and meant perhaps for an academic audience more than a general one, that is somewhat understandable and not even an issue. For us, however, it is. I would think that problem is rectified in the book which was most likely written with a different audience in mind. Here, though, the absence hinders his ability to speak with any authority.
The pathos is probably the most noticeable element present. The words "dead children" prompt a more emotional than rational response almost every time one hears them. The September 11 attacks themselves continue to elicit an emotional response years after the fact. Between the talk of the two, a cloud of pathos covers everything. Despite the fact that the pathos is used effectively, that effect is at times detrimental.
The logos is present, though. The historical references to the second world war and subsequent U.S. foreign policy are matters of record. If points such as when he references interviews and national news pieces were incorrect, he would have been called on them long before now, and that would be the case instead of the more colorful aspects of what he said. The words "collateral damage" are not new to the American lexicon. The tactics we have employed and the use of trade sanctions are matters of public record.
There is a largely forensic quality to the majority of the piece. This is an attempt to answer the question o how this happened, and Churchill's answer would appear to be that this is the force of history. American foreign policy has made this all but inevitable in his view. The immediate Iraq connection he makes doesn't really bear up with the information uncovered in the subsequent investigations, but there is no question that the two military targets in the wake of the attacks, Iraq and Afghanistan, were regimes that we had supported in the past when it suited our interests. The roosting chickens seem much more credible in that light. The deliberative element is also present near the end when he says what he believes would be steps in the right direction. He almost immediately acknowledges that these ideas and actions are too radical to ever come to pass.
It's difficult to overlook or, more accurately, look past the tone of the text. It's remarkably angry, and this anger leads the reader to the matter of figuring out why he's mad because he doesn't appear to be mad at the people who flew the planes. Instead, his anger seems to have been focused inward and through that prism reflected back onto us. When I look for the telos in his words, I see the possibility that he is trying to wake people up. Trying to make them see something they hadn't before. But I know that isn't it.
At the end of it all, the people I think he's trying to reach are the people like me. David Cross described the American people as "willfully ignorant", and I believe Churchill would agree. There are however, those who are not. There are people who know some of Churchill's claims about the brutality of U.S. foreign policy are very true, and there are those who see the emerging global/corporate world as something frightening and dangerous. Some acted out in protests; many others did nothing.
I must admit, I was one of those people. I remember hearing what was happening and thinking about the past G8 summits and the protests that accompanied them. In that moment, what was happening seemed inevitable. And that is where the anger is pointed, at people like me. Of the "civilian" population at large, we are the most morally culpable because we can't plead ignorance, yet we stood silent. And because he seems to believe that we have the ability to change events and affect policy, we are doubly damned. He's most angry with the people like himself who, like the good Germans he refers to, saw injustice and said nothing.