If there was a grim inevitability about the terrorist attacks in London this summer, there was a similar predictability about the response to them by some on the left’s wilder fringes. Beyond ritual condemnation of the attacks and expressions of sympathy for the victims, the attacks provided an opportunity for some to marshal new ammunition in the cause of old battles.
Always in a class of his own, John Pilger – the New Statesman’s ubiquitous cover star – claimed: ‘Were it not for Blair’s epic irresponsibility over Iraq the Londoners who died in the Tube and on the No 30 bus would almost certainly be alive today.’ Without making a single reference to the actual perpetrators of the attacks, Pilger blithely suggested: ‘The bombs of 7 July were Blair’s bombs.’ They were the result not simply of Britain and America’s ‘illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure’ in Iraq, but also of the ‘humiliation’ inflicted on the Middle East by the west for decades.
Despite Pilger’s suggestion that his view was one that had ‘struggled to be heard’, it was, in fact, widely aired on the opinion and letters pages of the liberal press. In the week following the attacks, for instance, the Guardian’s comment and analysis pages published lengthy pieces by Tariq Ali (‘It is safe to assume that the cause of these bombs is the unstinting support given by New Labour and its prime minister to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq’); Seamus Milne (‘Britain only became a target when Blair backed Bush’s war on terror’); Gary Younge (‘Did Downing Street really think it could declare a war on terror and that terror would not fight back?’); and Salim Lone (‘The London bombings allowed the president and Tony Blair to strut as anti-terror champions again, when in fact their policies continue to produce thousands of new terrorists’).
Wilfully or not, what Professor Norman Geras termed the ‘we told you so’ crowd muddled pretext and cause when describing the alleged link between the London bombings and the war in Iraq. Don’t forget that al-Qaida’s first attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre, after all, occurred a full decade before the invasion of Iraq in February 1993. Its attacks on the US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi and on the USS Cole, and the planning for 9/11, all occurred at the very moment President Clinton was leading an all-out effort to bring about the creation of a Palestinian state and peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
But chronology is not all that is awry in the far left’s account. What, for instance, were the demands made on the Turkish government – which had opposed the Iraq war – by the terrorists who attacked Istanbul in November 2003? ‘Purify all Islamic land from the filth of the Jews and the Americans,’ said the bombers. This looks a rather more sweeping demand than could be met by the US pulling its troops out of Iraq.
Days before these attacks in Istanbul, terrorists had attacked two synagogues in the Turkish capital, mirroring previous attacks in Morocco and Tunisia on Jewish targets by al-Qaida. Maybe there’s a pattern here? On the face of it, these do not appear to be individuals with whom Tony Blair might plausibly aspire to negotiate a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Were the Bali bombings al-Qaida’s revenge for Australia’s support for the US-led war on terror? Well, not entirely. Osama bin Laden’s subsequent statement suggested he was rather more bothered about Australia’s role in stopping Indonesian militias’ rape of East Timor. When Abu Bakr Bashir was arrested for the bombings he said that others could avoid the fate of his victims if they converted to Islam. Helpful advice, if it were not for the fact that al-Qaida and its allies have been busily butchering ‘heretical’ Shia muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As Professor Geras noted: ‘Ever on the lookout for damning causes, the root-causers never go for the most obvious of these. This is the cause, indeed, which shows, by its absence, why most critics of the Iraq war or of anything else don’t murder people when they get angry. It is the fanatical, fundamentalist belief system which teaches hatred and justifies these acts of murder.’ But that, of course, would let Tony Blair off the hook. Something the Pilgeristas would never accept.