<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2668" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>What caused the bombings? The bombers. Did Tony Blair do it? No. He had a cast-iron alibi, being in Gleneagles, signing the G8 agreement at the time.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Sociology can explain social trends, but the London bombings are too unique an event to yield to a sociological explanation. In statistical terms, Britain's Muslims are not bombers. Any sociological investigation would have to explain their overwhelmingly peaceable and law-abiding nature.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Political science might yield some insights, but of course political science takes willed behaviour as its subject. The cause of the bombings as a political act is the decision of the bombers. Political scientists would have to begin with the stated intentions of the bombers. We could ask whether the tactics were appropriate to the strategy. But that is difficult because they have announced no political objectives. The act must speak for itself, as it were. What does it say, apart from I wish you lot dead. </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>By analogy we could look at the intentions of other western-based Islamic terrorists, when we discover that Iraq features in their thinking largely as an exemplar of the corruption of human law, and the priority of the divine. If Al Qaeda were a mass movement in Britain one might try and understand it in terms of its social base. But it is not.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Psychology might yield insights, except of course we are reconstructing their motives retrospectively. Which should we give priority to? The breakdown in Mohammed Siddique Khan's marriage following his wife's refusal to wear a veil?  Germaine Lindsay's parental abandonment? Hasib Hussein's difficult adolescence? Shehzad Tanweer's privileged upbringing? No doubt the war in Iraq would be a factor in the mental life of these British Muslims; but identification with people so distant would be amongst the higher mental functions, and might give a rationale to more deeply felt emotions.</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The problem with all of these approaches is that they diminish the bombers' own volition, envisaging them as in the grip of an instinctive reaction. But the fact of the war is present in the minds of many people who do not choose to blow up their fellow citizens. Between the background event of the war, and the bombing there is the conscious choice of the bombers. Bombers make their own history, albeit not in circumstances of their own choosing.</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Tony Blair is guilt of much worse aggression against the people of Iraq. But the London bombings were the deliberate acts </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>of Mohammed Siddique Khan, Germaine Lindsay, Hasib Hussein and Shehzad Tanweer. More fool them.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>