Occupation Begets Bombers

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Occupation Begets Bombers
Michael Harris, Toronto Sun
July 15, 2005

Watching your citizens blown to bits is not the best of invitations to reflection.

Older, more basic instincts are engaged; fury, hatred and a lust for revenge. All three of those emotions have been on display in Britain this past week in the wake of the vicious tube and bus bombings that killed scores of innocent people and maimed hundreds of others.

Since the suicide-bombings in London, there have been seven days of reprisals against visible minorities in the U.K., from Merton in South London, where five white men were arrested for hurling bottles through the windows of a Sikh temple, to Birkenhead, where the Shajala Mosque was set ablaze with fire bombs, trapping a cleric inside who had to be pulled to safety through his upper-storey bedroom window by firefighters

DEADLY REVENGE ATTACK

And then over the weekend, at 4:30 on a lazy Sunday afternoon, a mob of white teens accosted a visitor from Pakistan, first demanding the cigarettes he had just bought, and then beating him to death as a "Taliban" when he refused to hand over his purchase. The old story: Seek vengeance, dig two graves.

But unlike the aftermath of 9/11, when trying to understand that gruesome attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon in the context of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East was the ultimate heresy, a number of Britons, including a Member of Parliament, are publicly connecting the dots between what happened in London to events in Fallujah, where 1,000 people were killed, half the city’s housing was destroyed and nearly every school and mosque reduced to rubble.

The Guardian’s Gary Younge, calling the events of July 7 "Blair’s blowback," defended his comparison between the London bombings and the levelling of Fallujah, which took place with the assistance of British forces. "They can and should be compared. We do not have a monopoly on pain, suffering, rage, or resilience. Our blood is no redder, our backbones no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those whose imaginations could not stretch to the misery we have caused in the Gulf now have something closer to home to identify with."

Younge is making what is usually referred to as the cause-and-effect argument, which neo-conservatives so fervently despise. It is the same argument that is made by Michael Scheuer, the U.S. CIA officer who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. He recently told CNN that it comes down to a bloody cycle — the U.S. and Britain occupy Muslim countries and then the occupied strike back where and how they can.

The counter-argument by the Bush administration, Prime Minister Blair, and even our own Deputy Prime Minister is that the Iraq war, universally criticized as illegal, immoral and inept, has nothing to do with terrorist bombings in the West. Suicide bombers hate who we are, how we live, and what we do, and are consumed by an irrational impulse to destroy innocent lives. No matter what we do they will attack us, hence it is better to take the war to them rather than fight it at home.

A book by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape lays out a well-documented challenge to that position. After studying 462 suicide terrorist attacks over a 24 year period from 1980, Pape found that 95% of the attacks shared a common "central objective" — the eviction of foreign troops from countries they believed to be occupied. Thirty years of terrorism in Britain bear out his findings. Twelve bombing attacks that killed 81 people between 1974 and 2001 were not the work of cowardly butchers who kill for their amusement, but of the Irish Republican Army, who want a 32-county Ireland and British troops out of Ulster.

A full two-thirds of al-Qaida suicide attacks from 1995 to 2004 were carried out in countries where the U.S. had military bases and combat troops. Professor Pape points out that before the March 2003 invasion, Iraq had never had a suicide bombing. Since the invasion, there has been a huge spike in suicide terrorism, with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in the first half of 2005.

In other words, the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As Gareth Evans, Australia’s former foreign minister and now head of the International Crisis Group put it, "the net result of the war on terror is more war and more terror. Look at Iraq: The least plausible reason for going to war — terrorism — has been the most harrowing consequence."

In the chilling phrase of Soumayya Ghannoushi of the University of London, we are all caught between Bush’s hammer and Bin Laden’s anvil. London, Bali, Madrid and Riyadh are not the answer to Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan.

Just ask the victims, at least the ones who are still able to talk.