Credit for the horrific bombings of the London Underground and a double-decker bus was immediately taken by "Qaida al-Jihad in Europe," as revenge for British "massacres" in "Afghanistan and Iraq." "If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden had said in one of his recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours." What made the bombing more appalling for the British was the fact that the bombers were members of its own Asian community, young men that had played cricket and eaten fish and chips. What, commentators anguished, could have made them hate their own country? The causes of the bombings sharply split British society.
Critics of the Iraq war such as journalist John Pilger charged that Tony Blair's "epic irresponsibility" has brought the daily horrors of Iraq home to Britain. The bombers had struck because he and Bush attacked Iraq, even though they had been warned by intelligence agencies that the terrorist threat would be "heightened by military action against Iraq" and had been told that under Saddam Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to his neighbours" and was "implacably hostile to Al-Qaeda." MP George Galloway had opposed the Afghan and Iraq wars on the basis that they would create '10,000 new bin Ladens.' Blair, said one commentator in the Guardian newspaper, was responsible for "knowingly putting his own people at risk in the service of a foreign power" (the USA)
Blair and his government refuted any connection between the bombing and Iraq, claiming that Britain had been under threat from terrorism before the Iraq war. They claimed that al-Qaida and its supporters had no demands that could possibly be negotiated over; that they were really motivated by a hatred of western freedoms and way of life; and that their "evil" Islamist ideology, aiming at global domination, was the cause of terrorism. Anti-Muslim commentators blamed the Muslim world for not condemning terrorism while others argued that Britain had been too tolerant of extremist groups on its territory. Suicide bombers were a weapon created by anti-Western propaganda from the Arab media, Islamic associations and schools, and the mosques, all over the world and in London as well: the solution was to crack down on the Islamic agitators, even if that meant sacrificing democratic freedoms. Pakistan was fingered for harbouring extremist Islamist schools on its territory which the bombers had allegedly visited. From America, came the cry that any retreat from Iraq would be appeasement of "Islamofascists." The British government called on its Muslim community to root out the terrorists in their midst.
Less partisan voices put the bombings in perspective. Former foreign minister Robin Cook pointed out that al-Qaida had been virtually created by Western intelligence agencies to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; governments had to be careful that the foreign policy actions they took did not create worst evils than those they sought to combat. Now, as another commentator pointed out, al-Qaida was in some ways a phenomenon of the Muslim Diaspora in the West itself, not something based in a foreign country that could be smashed with military means. The US Pentagon's own Defense Science Board wrote last fall that "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. According to Michael Scheuer, a retired CIA officer who had led the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s: "We're being attacked for what we do in the Islamic world, not for who we are or what we believe in or how we live," Last word went to the prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs which concluded that the Iraq war had set back the war on terrorism: the war had been a propaganda and recruitment tool for Islamic extremists and Iraq had become a terrorist training ground. By joining the US in the war on Iraq, Blair had made Britain a target of terrorism.
Opinion polls showed 85% of Britons agreed.
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