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Talkback
Who set the bombs?
In taking stock of the July 7 terrorist attacks on London, last week's Bay Guardian editorial "After London" states, "At this point, it's not entirely clear who set the bombs." How, then, to support the following claim, that "this international insecurity ... is the price that we pay for the invasion of Iraq"?
This claim must be at least partly false, since the horrors of Sept. 11, which the Bay Guardian explicitly counts as part of "this insecurity," occurred well before the invasion of Iraq. How much of this latest episode of insecurity was exacerbated by war, occupation, and regime change in the Middle East is an essential topic, but still subject to debate.
Reading on, one hopes for an answer in the lengthy quotations from a July 11 piece in the Guardian of London by Gary Younge, but finds only commentary on the war, derivative speculations, and accusations of "denial" on the part of British leaders.
It is certainly fair to note, as studies have shown, that Western military control of Iraq has won the resentment of many across the world and the Middle East – so long as one is willing to make the converse, if not necessarily equivalent, concession, that Western intervention has been welcomed by others. But it is quite another thing for Younge and the Bay Guardian to, in the admitted absence of data, presume and assert as "logic" what "values" the bombers "looked at" before they "made their choice." Younge and the Bay Guardian may eventually be proven right, but their psychological readings remain, for now, mere divination.
None of this is meant to argue for or against the war. It is only the troubled reflections of a leftist who senses his comrades have strayed. Only by studying Web sites and interviewing suspects will anyone be able to demonstrate that the motives for the London bombings can be partly – let alone entirely, as the Bay Guardian implies – owed to the war in Iraq.
Christopher R. Vaughan Palo Alto
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