"Afghanistan made a terror attack on Britain a likelihood; Iraq made it

[Benbow]

made it a certainty."

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.

<snip>

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. ... 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."

<snip>

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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/comment/story/0,16141,1528127,00.html

[JawJaw]

1. "It's Iraq, Stupid!"

One of the UK breakfast news programmes did a quick outside broadcast from Leeds (where the London bombers came from) this morning, and they were asking some local Muslim youth why they thought these men had carried out these actions.

One angry youth said that he STRONGLY condemned the actions of the bombers, but in an instant followed with (paraphrasing from memory) "50 people die in London, and you come up here to ask us what we think....thousands of people dying in Iraq, where are you then?"

I have to admit, he did rather have a point.

Bush and Blair can spin all they want & wrap themselves up in legal flim-flam, but it's quite clear that increasing numbers of people are seeing through the BS, & in some tragic cases are prepared to respond using deadly force.

[Benbow]

2. Great - several million people will have heard him

before anyone could edit him out. Yay.