"They" are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush’s policies in the Middle East . . . .
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe insurgency won’t come to us? One thing is certain: if Tony Blair really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more efficiently protect Britain - fight them there rather than let them come here, as Bush constantly says - this argument is no longer valid.
This point is well taken. Iraq was not part of the war against terrorism until Bush, Blair and the neoconservatives disingenuously made it one. Doing so was a blunder of monumental proportions.
For Prime Minister Blair to join Mr. Bush in his Mesopotamian madness may have been an even greater blunder on Blair's part than going into Iraq in the first place was on Bush's. It simply was not Britain's fight, until now. Moreover, it was made Britain's fight by the very sort of thing that invading Iraq was supposed to prevent: a terrorist attack on British soil.
It is lunacy to think that this could have been prevented; the British knew this would (not could) happen and acknowledged it. For months, warnings were sent to the British public from the government and the press that what happened yesterday would happen sooner or later. In addition, the British people have a better idea of why this would happen than Bush regime spokespersons would have Americans believe. As Andrew Brown said in a
piece published yesterday on
Salon.com (subscription or day pass required):
Very few people here believe they hate us for our freedoms. We think they hate us because our armies are in their countries.A fact with which we Americans must deal is that Mr. Bush's idea of a war on terror has not made us safer. We will no doubt continue to hear the rhetoric from Mr. Bush and his supporters that we must fight terrorism in Iraq so that we will not have to fight it America. This is nonsense. There is no reason a terrorist attack like the one in London yesterday or Madrid 15 months ago or Istanbul in November 2003 couldn't take place somewhere in America in the too near future. To invade Iraq, Mr. Bush move troops and material out of Afghanistan, where the terrorists were, to Iraq, where jihadists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were rendered ineffective by Saddam's brutal police state. Osama's terrorists and their allies in Afghanistan regrouped and made alliances with the formerly ineffective terrorists in Iraq, made resurgent thanks to Mr. Bush's blunder.
I have never, never in my life hoped more that I am wrong, but these chickens will come home to roost.
On the other hand, Osama is being just as disingenuous in proclaiming his solidarity with the Iraqi people as is Mr. Bush. Just as Bush shows his solidarity with the Iraqi people by appointing an American to lord it over the Iraqis like a classic colonial governor-general, torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib and slaughtering noncombatants in Falluja, so Osama shows his by making alliance with Zarqawi, who regards the faith of 60% of Iraqis as an Islamic heresy, its adherents as collaborators with either the US or Iran, and has been blamed for bloody attacks on Shia mosques. The US was not in Iraq on September 11, 2001, when nineteen men under Osama's direction murdered 3000 Americans. Osama's beef with the west did not start with the US-led invasion of Iraq and won't end when the US withdraws; if the US presence in Iraq had not provided Osama with fresh reasons to attack the infidel, he would have found others.
And then come the Muslims of Britain, who have long been awaiting this nightmare. Now every one of our Muslims becomes the "usual suspect", the man or woman with brown eyes, the man with the beard, the woman in the scarf, the boy with the worry beads, the girl who says she’s been racially abused.
I remember, crossing the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 - my plane turned round off Ireland when the US closed its airspace - how the aircraft purser and I toured the cabins to see if we could identify any suspicious passengers. I found about a dozen, of course, totally innocent men who had brown eyes or long beards or who looked at me with "hostility". And sure enough, in just a few seconds, Osama bin Laden turned nice, liberal, friendly Robert (Fisk) into an anti-Arab racist.
Tony Blair, unlike many in the Bush regime and several of their allies on the American right, makes a poor demagogue. Unfortunately, Britain has it's right wing, too, and they can be expected to take advantage of a climate of fear to suggest that the best way to fight terror is to wage a war with a mythical enemy within: anybody with brown skin who wears a turban and proclaims there is but one God and that Mohammad is His Prophet.
Islam has been one of the great faiths of mankind for 1400 years. Like all great faiths, it not monolithic and has adapted itself to different ways of life over time and space; like all great ideas, it has been used by its adherents for good and ill. Common sense should tell any one that Mohammad did not walk the earth in the seventh century CE in order to undermine a great nation yet unborn in a land yet unknown to people in his part of the world. Common sense should tell any one that only a few fanatics, not all Muslims, are the enemy.
Unfortunately, people living in a climate of fear are not always open to common sense.
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