A few obscenities after London bombing

Gwynne Dyer, London

Let's talk dirty. The Sept. 11 suicide hijackers -- all Arabs -- attacked the United States instead of Brazil or Japan because the U.S. government has been neck-deep in the politics of the Arab world for a generation, whereas the Brazilian and Japanese governments haven't. There is a connection between Washington's Middle Eastern policies -- its support for oppressive Arab regimes, its military interventions in the region, and its uncritical backing for Israeli government policies -- and the fact that Americans have become the preferred targets for Islamist terrorist attacks.

Indeed, no other non-Muslim nation except Israel was a target for Islamist terrorist attacks until after the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. And the attacks since then have been aimed at the citizens of countries that were complicit in that invasion: Londoners, not Parisians; Spaniards, not Germans; Australians holidaying in Bali, not Japanese holidaying in Malaysia.

There you have it: Two full paragraphs of obscenity. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself says so. He informed us last Tuesday that any attempt to link the terrorist attacks that struck the London transport system on July 7, and the subsequent failed attempts on July 21, to his decision to follow the Bush administration in invading Iraq was "an obscenity".

That's nonsense, of course. All the comments in the first two paragraphs of this article are about cause and effect. You may agree or disagree with the analysis, but discussions of cause and effect are still permissible and even necessary. So how does Blair -- and President George W. Bush in Washington, and Prime Minister John Howard in Canberra, and their partners elsewhere -- get away with forbidding us to talk about what is causing all this?

The key technique, which they all use, is to claim that any attempt to explain why these attacks are happening is also an attempt to condone and justify them.

Blair gave a virtuoso demonstration of the technique in his last press conference on Tuesday. He urgently needed to put some distance between his decision to invade Iraq and the phenomenon of young, British-born Muslims, not of Arab origin, blowing themselves and a large number of Londoners up. So he deployed his considerable rhetorical skills to change the subject.

What he said was this. "It is time we stopped saying: OK, we abhor (al-Qaeda's) methods but we kind of see something in their ideas or they have a sliver of an excuse or a justification for it.' They have no justification for it. Neither do they have any justification for killing people in Israel. Let's just get that out of the way as well. There is no justification for suicide bombing in Palestine, in Iraq, in London, in Egypt, in Turkey, anywhere."

Nobody had actually said that suicide bombings are justified. What they are saying, in increasing numbers, is that actions have consequences, and that the reason a few young British Muslims became suicide bombers in 2005, whereas none at all became suicide bombers in 2000, is precisely the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency pointed out recently, the invasion of Iraq has turned the country into a breeding ground for a new generation of Arab jihadis in the Middle East. What it failed to add was that it has also spread the virus of Islamist terrorism into Muslim communities in Western countries that previously contained only a few fanatics (as any community does). Until Iraq, none of them contained people so filled with rage and so convinced that they were involved in a holy war that they were willing to blow themselves and dozens of strangers up.

The problem is that the invasion of Iraq made it look (to those already susceptible to such extreme religious arguments) as if the Islamist extremists, who had barely any credibility outside the Arab world even ten years ago, were right. If there were no terrorists in Iraq, why did Western countries invade it? Because there is a Judaeo-Christian conspiracy to destroy Islam, stupid. If there is another Islamist terrorist attack in the United States, it is more likely to come from within the resident Muslim community, as it has in Britain, than from foreign infiltrators.

Most American Muslims, like most British Muslims, are appalled by the radical doctrines that are sweeping some of their young men and women away. But it is self-serving nonsense on the part of the governments of these countries to pretend that this is just some inexplicable outburst of violence by weird Muslim people. The laws of cause and effect still rule.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.