[lbo-talk] London Bombers

[Carl Remick]

>From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
>
>Carl Remick:
>"There is every reason to believe the prime motivation was political,and I 
>think we
>can safely assume that ...  Grievance over Iraq seems the most likely cause 
>for their
>actions."
>
>That's you imposing your rationalist framework onto the actions of the 
>religious obscurantism of Islam, doing violence to the actual belief 
>structure underneath. You want it to be about Iraq, because that is what 
>you feel unhappy about. Maybe the Leeds bombers are unhappy about Iraq as 
>well. But my guess is that they would have added it to the general melange 
>of anti-modernist complaints alongside prostitution, pop music and mixed 
>bathing. And what do they want in Iraq, one wonders, a popular democracy, 
>or a theocratic state?
>
>More to the point, what right have they to speak for the Iraqi people than 
>anyone else?

Your more-to-the-point point is pointless, James.  Obviously the bombers 
didn't have any right to (apparently) seek to speak for the Iraqi people or 
(definitely) blow up commuters.  The question is *why* did they think they 
had a right to?  Getting all-normative and chanting "shame on the bombers -- 
they had no right to do this" doesn't answer that question.  This gets back 
to George Gallloway's comment that the bombings were inexcusable but not 
inexplicable.


>Finally [from Carl], this gruesome argument:
>
>'George Bush said that his reelection was a "moment of accountability" for 
>the war on Iraq -- the London bombings look like another.'
>
>So Tony Blair is to be held accountable by any nutjob with a bomb in his 
>backpack?

Yes, any nutjob with a mandate of one and a bomb in his backpack *can* seek 
to hold fellow nutjobs like Tony Blair accountable by blowing up innocent 
bystanders, no matter how unfair this may be.  Rather than wailing about the 
injustice of it all, Brits should just take practical steps to reduce the 
chances of this happening -- by withdrawing all their troops from Iraq and 
binding over Blair for trial as a war criminal.

As Galloway said in Parliament July 7:  "Given that one cannot defend 
oneself against every angry man among the enragés of the earth, it follows 
that the only thing we can do is address what the Secretary of State called 
the causal circumstances that lie behind these events. That means trying to 
reduce the hatred in the world and trying to deal with the political crises 
out of which these events have flowed. If, instead of doing that, we remain 
in this consensual bubble in which we have placed ourselves, we will go on 
making the same mistakes over and over again. We will go on with Guantanamo 
Bay. We will go on as we are doing, making Abu Ghraib not smaller as we were 
told would happen after the photographs were published, but bigger. We will 
go on with occupation and war as the principal instruments of our foreign 
and defence policy. If we do that, some people will get through and hurt us 
as they have hurt us here today, and if we still do not learn the lesson, 
that dismal, melancholic cycle will continue."

Carl