My lurching back and forth on the cause-and-effect relationship between the disastrous Iraq invasion and the rise in nihilistic terror attacks across the globe continues. The Times of London takes another good crack at the issue.
Britons are ready to distinguish, as history will, between two largely separate threats to international security that have convulsed the world over the past four years. One, posed by Saddam Hussein until 2003, may have been exaggerated by the available intelligence but nonetheless left responsible leaders with difficult decisions. The other is the threat from terrorists, who claim to be Islamic, but are self-obsessed, nihilistic thugs. They are linked — but mainly by geography — in the continuing carnage wrought by suicide bombers in Baghdad.
The fact of Britain’s role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq clearly cannot be ignored as a consideration in this month’s bombings in London. But to see in them a simple, avoidable case of cause and effect — as some politicians who should know better, and others who plainly do not, have done — encourages in their listeners a grotesque confusion of reason and justification. It also bespeaks dangerous amnesia as to the recent, bloodsoaked history of terrorism carried out in the name of jihadi Islam.
I guess the point is, we can never really know what the linkage is, because it's almost impossible to understand what would cause seemingly ordinary people to engage in the kind of barbarism we've seen in London, Sharm el Sheik, and every day in Iraq (not to mention the 9/11 attacks in America). The visceral, emotional reaction is to blame the Iraq war. But that's probably just too simplistic. ... |
