LIES ABUT THE LONDON ATTACK

I - like many other will have kept hush for two minutes at midday. And quite right. I am against the slaughter of innocents, er, that was why I was against the war. I’m not so much into the conspiracy theory about the attack, more just the plain honest stupidity of the response. It’s pretty clear we’re going to go headlong down the same route as the Americans (there’s a change) in the aftermath of 9/11.

But there’s so much cant and hypocrisy now in the wake of the attack on London. It’s good to see someone at least stepping out of the straightjacket of performance journalism.

As Seamus Milne writes today: “It is an insult to the dead to deny the link with Iraq”.

Milne makes a number of important points amongst the hysteria. They are:

1. This was something we could see coming for months and months. “When the newly elected Respect MP George Galloway - who might be thought to have some locus on the subject, having overturned a substantial New Labour majority over Iraq in a London constituency with a large Muslim population - declared that Londoners had paid the price of a "despicable act" for the government's failure to heed those warnings, he was accused by defence minister Adam Ingram of "dipping his poisonous tongue in a pool of blood". Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy was in the dock for a far more tentative attempt to question this suffocating consensus. Even Ken Livingstone, who had himself warned of the danger posed to London by an invasion of Iraq, has now claimed the bombings were nothing to do with the war - something he clearly does not believe.”

2. Rote Outrage Gets You Nowhere. “The truth is that no amount of condemnation of evil and self-righteous resoluteness will stop terror attacks in the future. Respect for the victims of such atrocities is supposed to preclude open discussion of their causes in the aftermath - but that is precisely when honest debate is most needed.”

3. People are pretending that Al-Qaida exist in some kind of mad limbo-land where none of their demands could or should be met. “The reality was neatly summed up this week in a radio exchange between the BBC's political editor, Andrew Marr, and its security correspondent, Frank Gardner, who was left disabled by an al-Qaida attack in Saudi Arabia last year. Was it the "very diversity, that melting pot aspect of London" that Islamist extremists found so offensive that they wanted to kill innocent civilians in Britain's capital, Marr wondered. "No, it's not that," replied Gardner briskly, who is better acquainted with al-Qaida thinking than most. "What they find offensive are the policies of western governments and specifically the presence of western troops in Muslim lands, notably Iraq and Afghanistan."

4. This has nothing to do with Iraq. Er, excuse me? “The Labour MP Tony Wright insisted that such an idea was "not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense". Blair has argued that, since the 9/11 attacks predated the Iraq war, outrage at the aggression could not have been the trigger. It's perfectly true that Muslim anger over Palestine, western-backed dictatorships and the aftermath of the 1991 war against Iraq - US troops in Arabia and a murderous sanctions regime against Iraq - was already intense before 2001 and fuelled al-Qaida's campaign in the 1990s. But that was aimed at the US, not Britain, which only became a target when Blair backed Bush's war on terror. Afghanistan made a terror attack on Britain a likelihood; Iraq made it a certainty.

Read the full article here.