Back to the old ways. According to the Beeb, the bombings were apparently a response to the re-election of Tony Blair. His support for the Iraq war is somehow responsible. Money quote about Britain’s support for democratizing Iraq:
Britain therefore remains in the front line, and the option of withdrawing from Iraq and minimising the risk of further attacks is not presently open to British voters. They have taken their decision and must accept the consequences.
But didn’t the al Qaeda group claiming responsibility also cite intervention in Afghanistan as a grievance? And does this BBC editorialist believe that somehow the Jihadists are interested in some kind of deal with Britain, rather than being fanatically opposed to all forms of government that allow for religious and political freedom? Here’s his attempt to answer that question:
There are those who argue that it does not matter what Western governments do these days, that they are all under threat and some will come under attack. However, that discounts the level of political thinking which is evident among al-Qaeda groups. They certainly have their political strategy and judge governments accordingly. Al-Qaeda might not have a detailed political manifesto but it does have aims.
No space left for him to detail those aims. One of them is making sure that a writer for the BBC will never write freely again. You can, of course, infer some kind of political strategy behind this BBC argument: deflect the attacks to America or the Middle East; if we can keep our heads down, they won’t target us first; if we withdraw from Iraq, they’ll leave us alone. Sure, we can agree to disagree about the Iraq war. But the notion that al Qaeda needed such a war as a pretext for murdering Westerners is simply belied by history; and it represents a failure to understand even the basics of their ideology.
The Dish 