- They had been warned. The Aznars and the Blairs and the
Bushes had been told by those who were their allies - France and Germany
and many others, not to mention the Arabs - that their crusade against
al-Qa'ida could most cruelly rebound upon them. The Madrid bombings are
not only a terrible revenge for Spain's participation in "part two"
of the "war on terror" - the illegal invasion of Iraq - but a
cruel and incrementally more painful attack on civilians by al-Qa'ida.
-
- If America's neo-conservatives believe in the "war
of civilisations", then so does al-Qa'ida: what other effect could
the Madrid slaughter have in the West than to reinforce the notion - however
preposterous historically - that Islam and the West were in conflict? Civilians
are now to die in Europe as brutally as they have died in Bali and Tunisia
and Istanbul and - let us, for a moment, see the world through another
prism - as they have been torn to pieces by our bombs in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
-
- Sources close to Osama bin Laden's organisation are puzzled
about the strange message, supposedly from the attackers, which was printed
in the Arabic language paper Al-Quds al-Arabi. It suggested that the initial
response to Spain's involvement in Iraq was the attack on Italian troops
in Kerbala - if real, it would surely have referred to the killing of seven
Spanish intelligence officers near Hilla. Using a public statement to order
its own "cells" to make more attacks does not show the desperate
discretion which al-Qa'ida normally shows in its communications.
-
- But the arrests in Spain, the mobile phone calls, the
sheer scale of the train bombings shows an al-Qa'ida as confident and ruthless
as ever - and now resolved to attack in Europe. If the right foot fell
in Istanbul and the left foot fell in Madrid, where, geographically, will
the next right foot fall? We can take out an atlas and a ruler and work
it out for ourselves.
-
- I don't believe this is the Third World War. Nor is it
a "war on terror". Nor is it a "war of civilisations".
But our own leaders are wilfully leading us into a period of appalling
suffering because they will not address the causes of injustice in the
Islamic world. Repeatedly, our leaders were told of the consequences of
participation in America's Iraqi folly. They lied to us. They told us about
weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, about links between Iraq
and 11 September 2001 that didn't exist. Now, trapped in Iraq, we are desperate
to scuttle away, leaving behind us a half-trained force of collaboration
police who will - supposedly - shed their blood for ours.
-
- No, the murderers are the men who plant the bombs. The
killers are those who kill - and that includes our pilots as well as their
bombers. We don't want to kill civilians. But we know that our wars will
do that, and death does not come more pleasantly, less painfully, because
the victims are killed by the supposedly benevolent West rather than the
supposedly cruel East. Now we are beginning to pay the price.
-
- Did it really begin on 11 September 2001? No, it began
long before. And no amount of weasel words, no amount of church warden
sincerity can mask the degree to which we have been taken by our leaders
into this insane conflict.
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