[The damn thing is, Blair and Bush belong ultimately to the public.]
The responsibility we share for Islamist shock and awe: Citizens in democracies will be held to account for what is done in their name
Peter Wilby Friday August 5, 2005 Guardian
Shortly after September 11 2001, I was widely denounced for implying, in a New Statesman editorial, that by electing George Bush - who was known to be indifferent to anything but the interests of US capital - Americans had helped to bring the New York and Washington attacks on themselves. Now Omar Bakri Mohammed and other Muslim clerics blame Britons for the London bombings because they re-elected Tony Blair. Do I, as one who voted for Blair and travel regularly on the tube, agree with them?
Let me first explain what I was trying to say (perhaps clumsily) four years ago. When America goes to war - in Vietnam or the Middle East, for example - it kills many people who have had no chance to influence their rulers. Americans, however, claim their government is "of the people, by the people, for the people". America, on its own estimation, is a superpower which wishes to spread liberal capitalism.
The large majority of Americans (including migrants) have bought into this project and benefit from it - through cheap oil, for example, or through profits of US-based multinationals, which are often derived from expropriation of other countries' resources. Any president who fails to protect these benefits risks himself or his party losing office. So if they are serious about democracy, Americans should accept a share of responsibility for what is done in their name. And so should we, whose country is America's closest ally and accomplice. ...
How do you prosecute a war against the US and Britain? Muslims fight us on their own soil, but why should they not carry the fight to our homelands as we carry it to theirs? They do not possess the aircraft to fly over Washington and London and carry out "precision bombing". The security around US and British leaders is almost impenetrable, at least compared with that around buses and tubes. Most importantly, Muslim warriors may think, bombing western civilians gets results: the things that make it horrible to us make it more effective in their eyes (shock and awe, perhaps) and if there are enough such outrages, we will demand a retreat from Iraq. They may be wrong on this. But it is the price we pay for living in a democracy: theoretically, we are in charge so we are frontline targets.
"Responsibility" is a better word than "blame". We demand it, rightly, of those who carry out the atrocities; we should demand it also of ourselves and our rulers. The bombers, or rather those who control and influence them, are clear they are at war. President Bush seemed to agree when he declared a "war on terror". Is our role in this war a just one? Do we want to continue the war? If not, what will we do to stop it? Those are the questions we need to ask ourselves.
· Peter Wilby is a former editor of the New Statesman
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1542996,00.html>
Carl