My earlier post:
To be clear these bombings are a horrendous atrocity and those responsible should be apprehended and charged with murder.
That said IMO there are a few things that this bombing demonstrates along with the Madrid bombing:
1) that for all its stated aims the so called war on terror, that is, the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan has, after 4 years, still not resulted in the capture of Bin Laden and has not diminished the terrorists ability *in any significant way*
to launch attacks against the west. After all you don’t need to go to Afghanistan to learn to make nitro glycerin – all you need is household chemicals, a bath, some basic chemistry knowledge and a recipe that you can get off the internet in 5 minutes.
2) that in fact by participating in the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq (done of course in defiance of the opinion of the majority of the British public - although this is not itself a contributing factor to what I am about to say) the British government have, in all probability, both
a)increased the support for terrorist/radical groups in both the middle east and the west
and
b)increased the chance of Britain being a target (for anyone who doubts this let me know when, say, Estonia or Finland will have their capitals bombed at rush hour)
This is in addition to the fact that these operations have killed thousands of innocent people (as much as 100,000 in Iraq according to London based medical journal The Lancet), scattered AL Q across a wider and much harder to monitor region (and even perhaps created a new base for them in Iraq), brought back to power in Afghanistan a ruthless gang of drug pushers (heroin production has gone back up to what it was pre Taliban), undermined international law, increased global instability, strengthened the perception of the US as a predatory and out of control imperial power, and provided a convenient pretext for tyrannical and corrupt governments to repress domestic political dissent .
Again, the perpetrators of these crimes should be brought to justice. However just as the RAF don’t go and bomb Boston (the source of much republican funding, arms and support) every time a bomb goes off in London, so too should the west think clearly about bombing and invading countries especially where that is done on a false pretext, without a clear UN mandate, and without a clear exit strategy.
Last edited by Nick Forrer; 07-08-2005 at 05:01 PM.
'In the woods there is always a sound...In the city aways a reflection.'
'What about the desert?'
'You dont want to go into the desert'
- Spartan