Terrorism: What Goes Around Comes Around

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, the city that had recently suffered multiple terrorist bombings twice over, said what Tony Blair won't ever admit. For Blair to say what Livingstone said, he would be admitting to personal culpability for unnecessarily importing terrorism into Great Britain and causing the needless deaths of British Service people in Iraq, not to mention countless thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children.

Blair or as I would like to call B-liar should have been more wary of his transatlantic Rambo cousin. He should have stuck to the traditional British pro-Arab policy that his predecessors had adopted for British interests.

Livingstone put the blame for the rise of Islamic extremism squarely on what everyone knows already, namely, a century of unscrupulous Western interference in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asian regions and the perceived unfair treatment of Arabs. Those Muslim adherents see terrorism as the only way to make the big powers sit up and notice them. They are fedup of being ignored by arrogant powerful western nations who think it's their God-given right to trample over everyone in the Arab and Iranians' own neighbourhood.

Livingstone was even more specific about Western governments not being satisfied enough with just getting the oil but wanting to control its supply as well. Hence the West, particular the USA has frequently intervened, for example, in creating and supporting nasty dictatorships and overthrowing those they believed weren't sympathetic enough. I blogged on a similar example for the Vietnam of 1956 in Appeasement? Absolutely Not!

Needless to say, Blair rejected his comments.

Livingstone condemned all suicide bombings but was brave enough to admit to the fact of the USA recruiting and training the Talibans and Osama bin Laden to kill the Russians in Afghanistan, and now suffering from the phenomenon of "what goes around comes around."

Then Livingstone went directly to the kernel of the truth – he said:

"I have not the slightest doubt that, if at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn't have arisen."

"I have watched Western governments, so terrified of losing control of their fuel supplies, that all my life there have been interventions in the Middle East by Western governments."

"It is the double standards that flow from that. We initially welcomed Saddam Hussein to power, our intelligence services gave him lists of trade unionists and communists - as did the CIA - that we wanted killed, and he then turned on us."

"You have also got this running sore of the Palestine Israeli conflict. A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy."

Livingstone's comments basically supported the report of the leading British foreign policy think tank, Chatham House.

Ken Livingstone and George Galloway are two British politicians who have the decency to speak the truth.