The series of terrorist bombings that occurred in London on the opening day of the G8 summit in Scotland had striking similarities to the series of bombings of commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004 carried out by supporters of Saudi Arabian right-wing Islamist Osama bin Laden.
While the perpetrators no doubt hope to exert pressure on the British government to pull its troops out of Iraq, the bombings will be used by US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to try to boost support for their now highly unpopular war of state terror against the people of Iraq.
Both Bush and Blair claim that Iraq is the “central battlefront” in the US-led global “war on terror”. They argue that continuing the war against the patriotic Iraqi resistance to Washington’s attempt to seize control of Iraq’s huge oil resources will make the world “safer” from jihadist terrorist attacks.
This claim is a lie. The US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has provided bin Laden’s Islamist terrorist network with an enormous potential pool of sympathisers and recruits. As former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright pointed out two weeks after the Madrid bombings, the US-led war in Iraq “is a rallying cause for al Qaeda. It’s allowed it to attract new recruits ... Iraq has put new wind in its sails.”
The US-led counterinsurgency war in Iraq, Albright added, has enabled bin Laden and his jihadist followers to present themselves as the leaders “of all those [Muslims] who harbour anti-American sentiments whether for specific policy reasons or out of more general feelings of resentment”.
The conclusion that follows from this is obvious — taking the wind out of the sails of the Islamist terrorists requires a complete and immediate abandonment of the policies that have bred “anti-American sentiments” throughout the Muslim world. In the first place, this means the immediate withdrawal of all US and other foreign occupation troops from Iraq.
From Green Left Weekly, July 13, 2005.
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