It's The Occupation(s), Stupid

"These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers."
- Ronald Regan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns.

By now I am sure you have all read (not?) Patrick Cockburn's explosive article in the UK Independent, This War is no longer Winnable. Among other things well worth reading, Cockburn states:

The findings of an investigation, to be published soon, into 300 young Saudis, caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to Iraq to fight or blow themselves up, shows that very few had any previous contact with al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist organization previous to 2003. It was the invasion of Iraq which prompted their decision to die.

Some 36 Saudis who did blow themselves up in Iraq did so for similar reasons, according to the same study, commissioned by the Saudi government and carried out by a US-trained Saudi researcher, Nawaf Obaid, who was given permission to speak to Saudi intelligence officers. A separate Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Israel, also concluded that almost all had been radicalized by Iraq alone.

Of course, you will also have read (not?) a recent New York Times article, Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs, by Robert Pape, a man who has documented every case of suicide bombing between 1980 and 2004. Pape says:

Al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries.

... the overwhelming majority of attackers are citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries in which the United States has stationed combat troops since 1990.

Now Mike Whitney has put together an excellent piece, citing the above two articles while refuting the "hate-mongering" ideology of the US right-wing. Whitney also provides a much-ignored key quote from bin Laden himself:

"We fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation. Just as you lay waste to our nation, so shall we lay waste to yours.... Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security."

- Osama Bin Laden, Al Jazeera 11-01-04

The right-wingers, of course, say that this is nonsense. They say there is no negotiating with terrorists. They say Muslim fanatics want to install a caliphate system across the Middle East, subjugating millions to barbaric laws. And there is some truth in this, of course.

The problem is that the West's violent hypocrisy is doing nothing to stop that radical agenda from spreading. Instead, as the studies quoted by Cockburn and Pape prove, our elected leaders' unpopular, violent, illegal occupations of Arab lands are helping to promote bin Laden's agenda and spread it, even into Western countries.

Yet still we have people like Donald Rumsfeld insisting that any connection linking the recent terrorist attacks in Britain and Egypt to the US-led war in Iraq is "ridiculous". As Lew Rockwell eloquently points out today, such blatant denial of reality is itself not only ridiculous, but also dangerous:

Liberal Democratic party leader Charles Kennedy made the obvious observation when he remarked: "Those, like President Bush and Tony Blair, who have sought to link Iraq with the so-called 'war on terror' can hardly be surprised when members of the public draw the same link when acts of terrorism occur here in the United Kingdom."

... However, to admit that his actions precipitated the events would be a repudiation of Tony Blair’s entire post 9-11 career. So, naturally, he did what comes naturally to every politician. He ignored reality...

Let’s deny all the evidence. Like the repeated claims by Al-Qaeda and it’s imitators that they are acting to frustrate and repulse the decades long Anglo-American imperialism in the Arab world and now the installation of a new Anglo-American condominium over the Muslim world under the cover of "democratically-elected" puppet regimes to deflect widespread and rising hostility to their allied military despots and domestic sympathizers. Let’s ignore cause and effect and continue to insist on illogical and perverted explanations that purely by coincidence, I’m sure, continue to justify continued imperialism and it’s expansion into new lands in the futile search for a military solution to a political tactic...

Did the IRA commit their bombings, including an attack on Downing Street itself, because they hated the English way of life and English values or did they hate the government’s policy of occupying Northern Ireland? Could it be that just as one earlier occupation of a neighboring land produced terror on British soil, another occupation of a distant land has produced terror again.

I suspect Tony Blair is fully aware of how his policies have brought terror to Londoners, and disaster to Iraq, but such is the contempt for humanity and honesty by politicians in general and Tony Blair in particular, who has a long career behind him of deceit, that he refuses to acknowledge his complicity in this enormous crime he has committed in partnership with his confederate in state terror George W. Bush. Their joint project of bringing (Western managed) "democracy" to the brown-skinned peoples of the Earth riding a wave of aerial bombs is an insult to any pretence of morality.

Despite all the endless, frenzied, fear-generating, headline-grabbing 24/7 terrorist hoopla, our leaders' so-called "War On Terror" is achieving the exact opposite of its stated aims.

Whatever moral justification the West may once have claimed for its violent, self-interested adventurism has now been lost in the bloodied sands of Iraq, the torture rooms of Guantanamo Bay and the cash-soaked coffers of Halliburton Inc. Beyond morality, there is no longer even logic to what we are doing.

As Whitney says:

The source of the problem is not in the heart of Islam but in the sanctuaries of the American plutocracy, where fantasists who never held a rifle dreamt of leading the nation to war. Their muddled vision has now produced the greatest wave of terror the world has ever seen.

The real problem, as Whitney concludes, is not the "cancer in their midst", but the cancer in ours. We have become worse than the beast we once created, then set out to destroy.

UPDATE: The 7.30 Report has a new interview with Robert Pape here.