http://tinyurl.com/aryrr

It is an insult to the dead to deny the link with Iraq

Tony Blair put his own people at risk in the service of a 
foreign power

Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Thursday July 14, 2005

In the grim days since last week's bombing of London, the 
bulk of Britain's political class and media has 
distinguished itself by a wilful and dangerous refusal to 
face up to reality. Just as it was branded unpatriotic in 
the US after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington to 
talk about the link with American policy in the Middle East, 
so those who have raised the evident connection between the 
London atrocities and Britain's role in Iraq and Afghanistan 
have been denounced as traitors. And anyone who has 
questioned Tony Blair's echo of George Bush's fateful words 
on September 11 that this was an assault on freedom and our 
way of life has been treated as an apologist for terror.

But while some allowance could be made in the American case 
for the shock of the attacks, the London bombings were one 
of the most heavily trailed events in modern British 
history. We have been told repeatedly since the prime 
minister signed up to Bush's war on terror that an attack on 
Britain was a certainty - and have had every opportunity to 
work out why that might be. Throughout the Afghan and Iraq 
wars, there has been a string of authoritative warnings 
about the certain boost it would give to al-Qaida-style 
terror groups. The only surprise was that the attacks were 
so long coming.

But when the newly elected Respect MP George Galloway - who 
might be thought to have some locus on the subject, having 
overturned a substantial New Labour majority over Iraq in a 
London constituency with a large Muslim population - 
declared that Londoners had paid the price of a "despicable 
act" for the government's failure to heed those warnings, he 
was accused by defence minister Adam Ingram of "dipping his 
poisonous tongue in a pool of blood". Yesterday, the Liberal 
Democrat leader Charles Kennedy was in the dock for a far 
more tentative attempt to question this suffocating 
consensus. Even Ken Livingstone, who had himself warned of 
the danger posed to London by an invasion of Iraq, has now 
claimed the bombings were nothing to do with the war - 
something he clearly does not believe.

A week on from the London outrage, this official 
otherworldliness is once again in full flood, as ministers 
and commentators express astonishment that cricket-playing 
British-born Muslims from suburbia could have become suicide 
bombers, while Blair blames an "evil ideology". The truth is 
that no amount of condemnation of evil and self-righteous 
resoluteness will stop terror attacks in the future. Respect 
for the victims of such atrocities is supposed to preclude 
open discussion of their causes in the aftermath - but that 
is precisely when honest debate is most needed.

The wall of silence in the US after the much greater carnage 
of 9/11 allowed the Bush administration to set a course that 
has been a global disaster. And there is little sense in 
London that the official attitude reflects the more 
uncertain mood on the streets. There is every need for the 
kind of public mourning that will take place in London 
today, along with concerted action to halt the backlash 
against Muslim Britons that claimed its first life in 
Nottingham at the weekend. But it is an insult to the dead 
to mislead people about the crucial factors fuelling this 
deadly rage in Muslim communities across the world.

The first piece of disinformation long peddled by champions 
of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is that al-Qaida 
and its supporters have no demands that could possibly be 
met or negotiated over; that they are really motivated by a 
hatred of western freedoms and way of life; and that their 
Islamist ideology aims at global domination. The reality was 
neatly summed up this week in a radio exchange between the 
BBC's political editor, Andrew Marr, and its security 
correspondent, Frank Gardner, who was left disabled by an 
al-Qaida attack in Saudi Arabia last year. Was it the "very 
diversity, that melting pot aspect of London" that Islamist 
extremists found so offensive that they wanted to kill 
innocent civilians in Britain's capital, Marr wondered. "No, 
it's not that," replied Gardner briskly, who is better 
acquainted with al-Qaida thinking than most. "What they find 
offensive are the policies of western governments and 
specifically the presence of western troops in Muslim lands, 
notably Iraq and Afghanistan."

The central goal of the al-Qaida-inspired campaign, as its 
statements have regularly spelled out, is the withdrawal of 
US and other western forces from the Arab and Muslim world, 
an end to support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land 
and a halt to support for oil-lubricated despots throughout 
the region. Those are also goals that unite an overwhelming 
majority of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere and 
give al-Qaida and its allies the chance to recruit and 
operate - in a way that their extreme religious conservatism 
or dreams of restoring the medieval caliphate never would. 
As even Osama bin Laden asked in his US election-timed 
video: if it was western freedom al-Qaida hated, "Why do we 
not strike Sweden?"

The second disinformation line peddled by government 
supporters since last week's bombings is that the London 
attacks had nothing to do with Iraq. The Labour MP Tony 
Wright insisted that such an idea was "not only nonsense, 
but dangerous nonsense". Blair has argued that, since the 
9/11 attacks predated the Iraq war, outrage at the 
aggression could not have been the trigger. It's perfectly 
true that Muslim anger over Palestine, western-backed 
dictatorships and the aftermath of the 1991 war against Iraq 
- US troops in Arabia and a murderous sanctions regime 
against Iraq - was already intense before 2001 and fuelled 
al-Qaida's campaign in the 1990s. But that was aimed at the 
US, not Britain, which only became a target when Blair 
backed Bush's war on terror. Afghanistan made a terror 
attack on Britain a likelihood; Iraq made it a certainty.

We can't of course be sure of the exact balance of 
motivations that drove four young suicide bombers to strike 
last Thursday, but we can be certain that the bloodbath 
unleashed by Bush and Blair in Iraq - where a 7/7 takes 
place every day - was at the very least one of them. What 
they did was not "home grown", but driven by a worldwide 
anger at US-led domination and occupation of Muslim countries.

The London bombers were to blame for attacks on civilians 
that are neither morally nor politically defensible. But the 
prime minister - who was warned by British intelligence of 
the risks in the run-up to the war - is also responsible for 
knowingly putting his own people at risk in the service of a 
foreign power. The security crackdowns and campaign to 
uproot an "evil ideology" the government announced yesterday 
will not extinguish the threat. Only a British commitment to 
end its role in the bloody occupations of Iraq and 
Afghanistan is likely to do that.

[log in to unmask]